How practitioners integrate decision triggers with existing metrics in conservation monitoring.

Decision triggers are defined thresholds in the status of monitored variables that indicate when to undertake management, and avoid undesirable ecosystem change. Decision triggers are frequently recommended to conservation practitioners as a tool to facilitate evidence-based management practices, but there has been limited attention paid to how practitioners are integrating decision triggers into existing monitoring programs. We sought to understand whether conservation practitioners' use of decision triggers was influenced by the type of variables in their monitoring programs.

When and why do territorial coalitions occur? Experimental evidence from a fiddler crab.

Neighboring territory owners are often less aggressive toward each other than to strangers ("dear enemy" effect). There is, however, little evidence for territorial defense coalitions whereby a neighbor will temporarily leave his/her own territory, enter that of a neighbor, and cooperate in repelling a conspecific intruder. This is surprising, as theoreticians have long posited the existence of such coalitions and the circumstances under which they should evolve.

Colouration and colour changes of the fiddler crab, Uca capricornis: a descriptive study.

Colour changes in animals may be triggered by a variety of social and environmental factors and may occur over a matter of seconds or months. Crustaceans, like fiddler crabs (genus Uca), are particularly adept at changing their colour and have been the focus of numerous studies. However, few of these studies have attempted to quantitatively describe the individual variation in colour and pattern or their adaptive significance.

The fiddler crab Uca mjoebergi uses colour vision in mate choice.

Although the role of colour in mate choice is well known, few tests of colour vision have been based on mating behaviour. Females of the fiddler crab Uca mjoebergi have recently been shown to use claw coloration to recognize conspecific males. In this study I demonstrate that the females use colour vision for this task; preferentially approaching yellow claws over grey claws regardless of their intensity while failing to discriminate between yellow claws differing in intensity.

Visually mediated species and neighbour recognition in fiddler crabs (Uca mjoebergi and Uca capricornis).

Mating signals are often directed at numerous senses and provide information about species identity, gender, receptiveness, individual identity and mate quality. Given the diversity of colourful body patterns in invertebrates, surprisingly few studies have examined the role of these visual signals in mate recognition. Here, we demonstrate the use of claw coloration as a species recognition signal in a fiddler crab (Uca mjoebergi).