Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences
The marine annelid trait manifesto: A call to rethink functional traits for ecological and conservation research
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
The Raunkiæran shortfall, defined as the scarcity of knowledge regarding species' attributes, represents one of the major obstacles to developing sound biodiversity conservation strategies and understanding ecological processes. In this context, despite the importance of marine annelids as dominant components of benthic ecosystems and key agents of marine ecosystem functioning, no comprehensive [...]
Subsistence fisheries in Small Island Developing States: the case study of the goby-fry fishery in Guinea Gulf
Published: 2026-09-22
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Community-based Research, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
1. Artisanal and subsistence fisheries are crucial for the livelihood and food security of local communities of Small Island Developing States (SIDS), yet they remain largely excluded from formal catch statistics and management frameworks. Using Ostrom’s Social-Ecological Systems (SES) diagnostic framework, this study characterizes the previously unreported goby-fry (“peixinho”) fishery across 14 [...]
Positive outcomes and insights for scaling from a randomized pilot of a gear exchange program to reduce bycatch in small-scale fisheries
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Behavioral Economics, Environmental Studies, Marine Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Incentive-based conservation programs offer a promising approach for reducing fishing pressure on threatened species while supporting coastal livelihoods, yet causal evidence remains scarce. Modest budgets and small samples are a persistent challenge to evaluating pilots of novel conservation programs. We conducted a 12-month pre-registered randomized pilot of a gear exchange program in Aceh [...]
How closed is “closed”? Ambiguity in British Columbia’s Closed Containment aquaculture regulations
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Zoology
We examine disease-transmission risks to wild salmon associated with containment technologies proposed in 2025 under British Columbia’s transition away from open-net pen aquaculture. To ensure consistent terminology, and to avoid the mischaracterization of marine “semi-closed” flow-through systems as “closed containment,” we clarify categories of aquaculture production technologies and compare [...]
Meeting Mediterranean conservation targets through systematic conservation planning
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
The ocean is increasingly being used by new human activities, fueled by an expansion of the “blue-economy” adding new pressures to the marine environment. These changes are happening fast, and balancing biodiversity conservation and present and future uses of the marine space needs to be done in an equitable way for human and ecological communities. Here, we used a systematic conservation [...]
Recreational fishing drives the global spread of aquatic non-native species
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Recreational fishing provides substantial socio-economic benefits worldwide, yet its role in driving aquatic biological invasions remains insufficiently understood. Here, we assessed global evidence for recreational fisheries-mediated introductions of aquatic non-native species. Using a systematic review of 140 retained studies, we compared temporal trends, geographic coverage, introduction [...]
The Individualised Niche in Motion; quantifying individualised niches with movement data
Published: 2026-02-26
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Individuals of the same species often differ consistently in their use of resources, their responses to environmental gradients, and their movement decisions. Between-individual variation across niche axes has been shown to have important ecological consequences. Yet practical frameworks that translate modern tracking data into operational, comparable measures of niche individual specialisation [...]
Ecological examples of nonstationarity, nonlinearity, and statistical interactions in dynamic structural equation models
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecologists are adapting structural causal modelling for spatial, phylogenetic, and time-series analysis. However, ecological extensions of path analysis and structural equation models (SEM) typically assume that interactions (“path coefficients”) are stationary, linear, and additive, while ecological and evolutionary dynamics are often nonstationary, nonlinear, and include statistical [...]
Life-history-specific thresholds for the Fishing Mortality Index: validation on 209 stocks
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
The exploitation fraction E = F/(F+M) has served as a standard metric for assessing fishing pressure since Gulland (1971), with E = 0.5 widely adopted as a precautionary threshold. However, E compresses the relationship between fishing mortality (F) and natural mortality (M) into a single dimension, obscuring magnitude differences across life histories. We introduce the Fishing Mortality Index [...]
Movement-informed projections of Bristol Bay red king crab seasonal distribution to support spatial management decisions
Published: 2025-09-22
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Understanding seasonal shifts in the spatial distribution of Bristol Bay red king crab (BBRKC) is essential to developing adaptive management strategies that promote sustainable harvest. Although fishery harvests suggest a substantial shift in the distribution of male crab between late spring (when fishery-independent bottom trawl surveys occur) and autumn (during the directed fishery), the [...]
Unequal Thermal Risks in a Socioeconomically Important Tropical Reef Fishery
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Climate change poses an understudied threat to the coastal reef systems of the Western Indian Ocean (WIO), a biodiversity hotspot critical for the maintenance of subsistence fisheries. The southwestern coast of Madagascar is especially sensitive to disturbances due to the high level of socioecological dependence on functioning reefs. Fishing in this region is spatially structured. For example, [...]
Mapping the landscape of live baitfish regulations for aquatic invasive species prevention in the United States
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Marine Biology, Public Policy
Aquatic invasive species (AIS) pose a significant risk to global ecosystems, economies, and societies. In the United States, the live baitfish trade is a major pathway for their spread. While the presence of invasive species and pathogens in this trade has been documented, a comprehensive, nationwide analysis of the regulations governing live baitfish has been lacking. This study fills that gap [...]
No effect of short-term ocean acidification on individual-level variation in behaviour and susceptibility to predation in a Great Barrier Reef damselfish
Published: 2025-09-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology, Integrative Biology, Marine Biology, Physiology, Zoology
1) Ocean acidification, caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, has been reported to negatively impact a wide variety of behaviours in fishes, including activity, exploration, and predator avoidance. 2) These effects have been documented at the population level, but many animal species naturally show large and repeatable individual-level differences in behaviour. How [...]
Behavioural tactics across thermal gradients align with partial morphological divergence in brook charr
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Animal Studies, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences
Understanding how animals balance environmental constraints is essential for predicting species persistence under climate change. In thermally stratified lakes, cold-water fishes such as brook charr (Salvelinus fontinalis) must navigate vertical gradients in temperature and oxygen to optimize foraging while avoiding physiological stress. We hypothesized that individuals would exhibit behavioral [...]
Generalized graphical mixed models connect ecological theory with widely used statistical models
Published: 2025-06-06
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Multivariate Analysis
Ecological dynamics are analyzed across multiple sites, times, and variables. Here, we introduce the family of generalized graphical mixed models (GGMMs) and show that it extends structural equation, generalized additive, and generalized linear mixed models. GGMMs represent ecological systems using a mathematical graph, where each analytic unit (node for each site-time-variable) has a direct [...]