Emerging infectious diseases are increasingly originating from wildlife. Many of these diseases have significant impacts on human health, domestic animal health, and biodiversity. Surveillance is the key to early detection of emerging diseases. A zoo based wildlife disease surveillance program developed in Australia incorporates disease information from free-ranging wildlife into the existing national wildlife health information system. This program uses a collaborative approach and provides a strong model for a disease surveillance program for free-ranging wildlife that enhances the national capacity for early detection of emerging diseases.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
In gape-limited predators, gape size restricts the maximum prey size a predator is capable to ingest. However, studies investigating the energetic consequences of this relationship remain scarce. In this study we tested the hypothesis that gape-size variability influences individual body condition (a common proxy for fitness) in one of the largest freshwater teleost predators, the barramundi. We found that individual barramundi with larger gapes relative to body size had higher body condition values compared to conspecifics with smaller gapes.Body condition was highest soon after the wet-season, a period of high feeding activity on productive inundated floodplains, and body condition decreased as the dry-season progressed when fish were restricted to dry season remnant habitats. The increased condition obtained during the wet season apparently offsets weight loss through the dry season, as individuals with large gapes were still in better condition than fish with small gapes in the late dry season. Elucidation of the links between intraspecific variability in traits and performance is a critical challenge in functional ecology. This study emphasizes that even small intraspecific variability in morphological trait values can potentially affect individual fitness within a species' distribution.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Trait‐based models of ecological communities and ecosystem functioning often fail to account for intraspecific variation in functional traits, assuming that intraspecific variability is negligible compared with interspecific variability. However, this assumption remains poorly tested across vertebrate animals where past studies routinely describe species according to mean trait values without explicit consideration of individual trait variability. We assessed nine functional traits for 4254 individuals belonging to 15 freshwater fish species from 11 families in northern Australia, including body elongation, body shape, caudal peduncle throttle, eye size, eye position, gape shape, gape size, mouth position, and pectoral fin length. We quantified the extent and geography of intraspecific trait variability and its relationship with riverine hydrologic regimes using a structured sampling design. Using a combination of single‐ and multi‐trait analyses, we demonstrate that intraspecific trait variability can contribute up to 70% of the total trait variability depending on the attribute considered and averaged 31% across all traits. The magnitude of intraspecific trait variability also varied across the hydrological permanency gradient. Fish assemblages in intermittent streams subjected to frequent environmental disturbance had high intraspecific trait variability, most likely due to strong abiotic filters limiting interspecific divergence. Conversely, assemblages in perennial rivers with less harsh environmental filters but with a larger pool of species expressed lower intraspecific trait variability: This is most likely due to stronger resource competition (biotic filter), which promotes specialization of resource use and, consequently, interspecific divergence. Our study provides the first evidence of intraspecific trait variability driven by a disturbance gradient for an animal group and points to the need for additional research into the functional importance of intraspecific variability in animal ecology. A better understanding of the patterns, drivers, and implications of intraspecific trait variability will help guide mechanistic‐based predictions of the effects of environmental changes on community assemblage and ecosystem processes.
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