Coral morphology has important implications across scales, from differences in physiology, to the environments they are found, through to their role as ecosystem engineers. However, quantifying morphology across taxa is difficult, and so morphological variation is typically captured via coarse growth form categories (e.g. arborescent and massive). In this study, we develop an...
Spider orb-webs are the ultimate anti-ballistic devices, capable of dissipating the relatively massive kinetic energy of flying prey. Increased web size and prey stopping capacity have co-evolved in a number orb-web taxa, but the selective forces driving web size and performance increases are under debate. The rare, large prey hypothesis maintains that the energetic benefits of...
Reef coral assemblages are highly dynamic and subject to repeated disturbances, which are predicted to increase in response to climate change. Consequently there is an urgent need to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying different recovery scenarios. Recent work has demonstrated that reef structural complexity can facilitate coral recovery, but the mechanism...
Two facets of climate change–increased tropical storm intensity and ocean acidification–are expected to detrimentally affect reef-building organisms by increasing their mortality rates and decreasing their calcification rates. Our current understanding of these effects is largely based on individual organisms’ short-term responses to experimental manipulations. However...
By linking ecological theory with freely-available Google Earth satellite imagery, landscape-scale footprints of behavioural interactions between predators and prey can be observed remotely. A Google Earth image survey of the lagoon habitat at Heron Island within Australia's Great Barrier Reef revealed distinct halo patterns within algal beds surrounding patch reefs. Ground truth...
A synthesis of phenotypic and quantitative genomic traits is provided for bacteria and archaea, in the form of a scripted, reproducible workflow that standardizes and merges 26 sources. The resulting unified dataset covers 14 phenotypic traits, 5 quantitative genomic traits, and 4 environmental characteristics for approximately 170,000 strain-level and 15,000 species-aggregated...
Spider silks exhibit remarkable properties, surpassing most natural and synthetic materials in both strength and toughness. Orb-web spider dragline silk is the focus of intense research by material scientists attempting to mimic these naturally produced fibres. However, biomechanical research on spider silks is often removed from the context of web ecology and spider foraging...
Joshua S Madin Michael J O'Donnell Sean R Connolly Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article - sign up in
Efforts to restore top predators in human-altered systems raise the question of whether rebounds in predator populations are sufficient to restore pristine foodweb dynamics. Ocean ecosystems provide an ideal system to test this question. Removal of fishing in marine reserves often reverses declines in predator densities and size. However, whether this leads to restoration of key...
Vandvik William D. Pearse Florian D. Schneider Jens Kattge Jorrit H. Poelen Joshua S. Madin Markus J. Ankenbrand Caterina Penone Xiao Feng Vanessa M. Adams John Alroy Samuel C. Andrew Meghan A. Balk Lucie M
Florian D. Schneider Jens Kattge Jorrit H. Poelen Joshua S. Madin Markus J. Ankenbrand Caterina Penone Xiao Feng Vanessa M. Adams John Alroy Samuel C. Andrew Meghan A. Balk Lucie M. Bland Brad L. Boyle
. Madin, Kristen D. Anderson, Magnus Heide Andreasen, Tom C.L. Bridge, Stephen D. Cairns, Sean R. Connolly, Emily S. Darling, Marcela Diaz, Daniel S. Falster, Erik C. Franklin, Ruth D. Gates, Aaron M.T