Tropical cyclones play an increasingly important role in shaping ecosystems. Understanding and generalizing their responses is challenging because of meteorological variability among storms and its interaction with ecosystems. We present a research framework designed to compare tropical cyclone effects within and across ecosystems that: a) uses a disaggregating approach that measures the responses of individual ecosystem components, b) links the response of ecosystem components at fine temporal scales to meteorology and antecedent conditions, and c) examines responses of ecosystem using a resistance–resilience perspective by quantifying the magnitude of change and recovery time. We demonstrate the utility of the framework using three examples of ecosystem response: gross primary productivity, stream biogeochemical export, and organismal abundances. Finally, we present the case for a network of sentinel sites with consistent monitoring to measure and compare ecosystem responses to cyclones across the United States, which could help improve coastal ecosystem resilience.
Dryad data: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5g8c5.abstract: Selection on naturally occurring hybrid individuals is a key component of speciation theory, but few studies examine the functional basis of hybrid performance. We examine the functional consequences of hybridization in nature, using the freshwater sunfishes (Centrarchidae), where natural hybrids have been studied for more than a century and a half. We examined bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus), green sunfish (Lepomis cyanellus), and their naturally occurring hybrid, using prey-capture kinematics and morphology to parameterize suction-feeding simulations on divergent parental resources. Hybrid individuals exhibited kinematics intermediate between those of the two parental species. However, performance assays indicated that hybrids display performance most similar to the worse-performing species for a given parental resource. Our results show that intermediate hybrid phenotypes can be impaired by a lessthan-intermediate performance and hence suffer a larger loss in fitness than could be inferred from morphology alone.Keywords: functional morphology, suction feeding, ecological speciation, extrinsic postzygotic isolation.What role does hybridization play in the origin of species? Biologists have long known that interspecific hybrids are common in nature and occur at a range of evolutionary timescales (Müller 1868; Henshaw 1885; Hollick 1888; Elliot 1892; McCormick 1893; Cockayne and Allan 1926). We also now know that many genomes, including our own, bear the signature of past hybridization with closely related species (Heliconius Genome Consortium 2012;Sankararaman et al. 2014). However, it is currently unclear whether hybridization plays a major role in the generation of new biodiversity (Seehausen 2004) or whether it is primarily a reflection of costly mistakes in mate choice by the parental species (Anderson and Stebbins 1954).Most research on hybridization focuses on selection against hybrid individuals, often called postzygotic isolation, which is thought to play a critical role in speciation Orr 1989, 2004;Turelli et al. 2001). Much of this research focuses on intrinsic incompatibilities, which can cause hybrid offspring to be inviable, sterile, or sex biased (Orr and Turelli 2001). Extrinsic postzygotic isolation, sometimes called ecological speciation, also involves selection against hybrid individuals that are viable under laboratory conditions but disfavored by natural selection in the wild (Schluter 1995). Recently, progress has been made on the mechanisms of intrinsic postzygotic isolation (Martin and Willis 2010; Cattani and Presgraves 2012), but we are also starting to understand ecological speciation mechanisms, which depend crucially on ecological interactions (Arnegard et al. 2014).Hybridization can also create new species directly. In Galapagos finches, hybridization is thought to have given rise to a new, reproductively isolated population of finches that exhibit a beak phenotype and a male song different from those of either of the two pa...
Tropical cyclones drive coastal ecosystem dynamics, and their frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution are predicted to shift with climate change. Patterns of resistance and resilience were synthesized for 4138 ecosystem time series from n = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosystems will respond to future disturbance regimes. Data were grouped by ecosystems (fresh water, salt water, terrestrial, and wetland) and response categories (biogeochemistry, hydrography, mobile biota, sedentary fauna, and vascular plants). We observed a repeated pattern of trade-offs between resistance and resilience across analyses. These patterns are likely the outcomes of evolutionary adaptation, they conform to disturbance theories, and they indicate that consistent rules may govern ecosystem susceptibility to tropical cyclones.
Abiotic factors can influence the distribution of organisms through physiological tolerance limits and by affecting their sensory performance in critical life history functions such as foraging or predator avoidance. In estuaries, salinity and turbidity directly influence the distribution of organisms but the indirect, synergistic effects of these factors on trophic interactions and community structure remain obscure. We investigated the effects of salinity and turbidity on oyster reef communities by comparing oyster reef community structure in low vs. high turbidity in consecutive years that varied considerably in rainfall and ambient salinity levels. Turbidity had significant effects in both 2016 and 2017 by interfering with fish foraging ability and consumption. In turbid sites, fish predation decreased by ~21%, crab mesopredators were 11% larger and nearly 5 times more abundant due to reduced top-down control by fish, and oyster reef biodiversity was 12% lower. In 2016, oysters were 350% less abundant in sites with abundant crab predators. However, in 2017, salinity increased, facilitating a new predator (oyster drills Stramonita haemastoma) to emerge onto reefs, and oysters were 7 times less abundant in sites with oyster drills despite having fewer crab predators. Thus, salinity and turbidity can indirectly affect food webs by facilitating different predators and influencing their sensory performance. Turbidity had significant effects on estuarine food webs regardless of salinity levels, and like salinity, turbidity should also be considered in oyster reef restoration and management of estuarine ecosystems.
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