Planned missing data designs and methods: Options for strengthening inference, increasing research efficiency and improving animal welfare in ecological and evolutionary research.

Ecological and evolutionary research questions are increasingly requiring the integration of research fields along with larger data sets to address fundamental local- and global-scale problems. Unfortunately, these agendas are often in conflict with limited funding and a need to balance animal welfare concerns. Planned missing data design (PMDD), where data are randomly and deliberately missed during data collection, combined with missing data procedures, can be useful tools when working under greater research constraints.

Timing of maternal exposure to toxic cyanobacteria and offspring fitness in : Implications for the evolution of anticipatory maternal effects.

Organisms that regularly encounter stressful environments are expected to use cues to develop an appropriate phenotype. Water fleas ( spp.) are exposed to toxic cyanobacteria during seasonal algal blooms, which reduce growth and reproductive investment.

Patterns, biases and prospects in the distribution and diversity of Neotropical snakes.

Motivation: We generated a novel database of Neotropical snakes (one of the world's richest herpetofauna) combining the most comprehensive, manually compiled distribution dataset with publicly available data. We assess, for the first time, the diversity patterns for all Neotropical snakes as well as sampling density and sampling biases.

Main Types Of Variables Contained: We compiled three databases of species occurrences: a dataset downloaded from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a verified dataset built through taxonomic work and specialized literature, and a combined dataset comprising a cleaned version of the GBIF dataset merged with the verified dataset.

Multiple opportunistic pathogens can cause a bleaching disease in the red seaweed Delisea pulchra.

While macroalgae (or seaweeds) are increasingly recognized to suffer from disease, in most cases the causative agents are unknown. The model macroalga Delisea pulchra is susceptible to a bleaching disease and previous work has identified two epiphytic bacteria, belonging to the Roseobacter clade, that cause bleaching under laboratory conditions. However, recent environmental surveys have shown that these in vitro pathogens are not abundant in naturally bleached D.