Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Marine Biology
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]
Oxygen supersaturation has negligible effects on warming tolerance in aquatic ectotherms
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Under the midday sun when photosynthesizers are producing oxygen, shallow aquatic ecosystems can become supersaturated with oxygen (>100% air saturation) while they simultaneously peak in water temperature. It has been suggested that oxygen supersaturation could protect water-breathing animals from mortality during heatwaves because of the potential role of oxygen in governing thermal [...]
Global population delineations and conservation status for marine turtles: tools, methods, and guidance
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Marine Biology, Other Life Sciences, Population Biology
Removing dead coral after marine heatwaves can mitigate coral-algae competition and increase viable coral recruitment
Published: 2025-05-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Ecological disturbance regimes are shifting and leaving behind novel legacies, like the remnant structures of dead foundation species, which have poorly known impacts on ecosystem resilience. We explored how dead coral skeletons produced by marine heatwaves–material legacies of increasingly common disturbances on coral reefs–influence spatial competition between corals and macroalgae, focusing on [...]
Slithering Sentinels: assessing the relevance of sea snakes as bioindicators for monitoring New Caledonia's Lagoon
Published: 2025-05-01
Subjects: Biology, Marine Biology
Coral reefs are vital ecosystems, rich in biodiversity and economically significant. However, they face severe threats from human activities such as climate change, pollution, and overfishing. Large-scale monitoring is crucial for their conservation. Integrative bioindicators are needed to better assess their health. Marine snakes, as high-level predators with strong site fidelity, are excellent [...]
Seasonal upwelling and depth-driven gradients foster functional overdispersion in Southwestern Atlantic annelid assemblages
Published: 2025-04-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Marine communities on continental shelves form through a combination of environmental filtering, biotic interaction, and dispersal-based processes. These shelves present depth-related environmental gradients from nearshore and seasonal upwelling systems, which periodically supply cold, dispersalenhancing, nutrient-rich waters, providing an ideal setting to explore spatiotemporal [...]
Seeking to quantify contributions that fisheries operations can make to a global Nature Positive goal
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology
Amidst global efforts to address biodiversity loss, the concept of ‘Nature Positive’ has gained traction as a societal goal aligned with the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). While the goal is increasingly being embraced by businesses and governments, there has been little investigation into how fisheries, a key sector in the global economy and a major driver of marine biodiversity loss, could [...]
The case for octopus sentience: a follow-up to Simone’s “Are octopuses sentient beings?”
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Recently, a paper published in a Brazilian malacology online journal argued against the existence of sentience in octopuses based on disputable arguments – the presence of cannibalistic behavior, absence of sociality and parental care, short lives, size and complexity of the nervous system and intelligence. This response discusses a different perspective on the issue of octopus sentience, [...]
The impact of the rhizocephalan parasitic barnacle on its host crab through non-consumptive effects
Published: 2025-04-21
Subjects: Marine Biology
Parasites can significantly influence ecological communities by altering host traits. Rhizocephalans, a group closely related to thoracican barnacles within Cirripedia, are common in marine ecosystems and profoundly impact their hosts, most notably by inducing reproductive castration. However, their influence on other host traits, particularly those related to predator defense, remains [...]
Vibrissae length as a morphological proxy for foraging behaviour in pinnipeds
Published: 2025-04-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Marine Biology
Foraging behavior is a key driver of ecological and evolutionary processes, with individual specialization shaping how populations respond to environmental change. Polymorphisms in foraging strategies can both enhance and limit behavioral flexibility at the population level, making it crucial to study individual variation. However, studying foraging is notoriously difficult, and while biologging [...]
Seasonal dynamics of epifaunal communities on the Sargassum beds of the coast of Noto Peninsula, Japan
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Marine Biology
Epifaunal communities inhabiting seaweeds are key components of temperate rocky reef ecosystems, playing vital roles in nutrient cycling and biodiversity maintenance. However, limited research has addressed their seasonal dynamics in the semi-enclosed Sea of Japan. This study examined the seasonal changes in epifaunal communities associated with two dominant brown algae, Sargassum macrocarpum and [...]
Validating causal inference in time series models with conditional-independence tests
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Sustainability
Ecologists often use time-series models to approximate dynamics arising from density dependence, species interactions, community synchrony, and other processes. Dynamic structural equation models can represent simultaneous and lagged interactions among variables with missing data, and therefore encompasses a wide family of analyses (linear regression, vector autoregressive models, and dynamic [...]
Grazer-induced bioluminescence and toxicity in marine dinoflagellates
Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Biology
Marine copepods are the most abundant type of multicellular zooplankton in the global oceans. They imprint their surrounding waters with a unique bouquet of polar lipids; copepodamides. Copepodamides are recognized by prey organisms, who respond by inducing defensive traits including bioluminescence, toxin production, colony size plasticity and structural modifications. Copepodamides are [...]
Bottom-up interactions in age-structured stock assessment and state-space mass-balance modelling
Published: 2025-01-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology
Age-structured stock assessment models are used worldwide to predict the likely impact of changing harvest on future fisheries yield. However, age-structured models ignore the impacts of predator consumption on prey survival (top-down impacts) and prey availability on predator growth (bottom-up impacts), whereas multispecies statistical catch-at-age models often incorporate top-down but not [...]
Unbaited underwater video evidences the presence of previ-ously unrecorded fish species, sea krait (Laticauda sp.) and a high frequency of sharks at a remote reef complex (Coral Sea Marine Park, Southwest Pacific)
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
The Chesterfield-Bellona atolls and reefs are a vast reef complex located in the Coral Sea Marine Park, estab-lished in 2014 in the New Caledonian Economic Exclusive Zone. In 2013, the New Caledonia government supported the first assessment of fish and benthic habitats conducted in all habitats and over the entire area. The assessment provided a primary knowledge base for establishing the [...]