Marine protected areas (MPAs) are important tools for managing marine ecosystems. MPAs are expected to replenish nearby exploited populations through the natural dispersal of young, but the models that make these predictions rely on assumptions that have recently been demonstrated to be incorrect for most species of fish. A meta‐analysis...
**1.** Growth rates directly influence individual fitness and constrain the flow of energy within food webs. Determining what factors alter the energetic cost of growth is therefore fundamental to ecological and evolutionary models. **2.** Here, we used theory to derive predictions about how the cost of growth varies over ontogeny and with temperature...
Our findings suggest that body size distribution, reef area, and temperature are major predictors of species richness and accumulation across scales, consistent with recent theories linking home range to species-area relationships as well as metabolic effects on speciation rates. Based on our results, we hypothesise that in less diverse areas, species are larger and likely more dispersive, leading to larger range sizes and less turnover between sites...
Despite decades of research, we remain uncertain whether the TSR is an adaptive response to temperature‐related physiological (enzyme activity) or ecological changes (food, predation and other mortality), or a response to constraints operating at a cellular level (oxygen supply and associated costs). To make progress, ecologists, physiologists, modellers and geneticists should work together to develop a cross‐disciplinary...
Our findings support results from Rass (1941) and some predictions from Winemiller and Rose (1992). The effects of environmental means and predictability on marine fish egg size are largely consistent with those observed in marine invertebrates with feeding larvae, suggesting important commonalities in how ectotherm egg size responds to environmental change. Our results further suggest that anthropogenically-mediated changes in the environment will have profound effects on the distribution of marine life histories.
Body size determines total reproductive-energy output. Most theories assume reproductive output is a fixed proportion of size, with respect to mass, but formal macroecological tests are lacking. Management based on that assumption risks underestimating the contribution of larger mothers to replenishment...
The allocation of metabolic energy to growth fundamentally influences all levels of biological organisation. Here we use a first‐principles theoretical model to characterise the energetics of fish growth at distinct ontogenetic stages and in distinct thermal regimes...
Taxonomic nestedness, the degree to which the taxonomic composition of species-poor assemblages represents a subset of richer sites, commonly occurs in habitat fragments and islands differing in size and isolation from a source pool. However, species are not ecologically equivalent and the extent to which nestedness is observed in terms of functional trait composition of assemblages still remains poorly known...