theory

Editorial: Unifying Ecology Across Scales: Progress, Challenges and Opportunities

Ecology is the science of how living systems grow, change, and persist. Although this is not the definition presented in most textbooks, this is the central theme of this scientific discipline as it is practiced in the current era of rapid global change. Change comes...

Nutrient limitation, bioenergetics and stoichiometry: a new model to predict elemental fluxes mediated by fishes

**1.** Energy flow and nutrient cycling dictate the functional role of organisms in ecosystems. Fishes are key vectors of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in aquatic systems, and the quantification of elemental fluxes is often achieved by coupling bioenergetics and stoichiometry. While nutrient limitation has been accounted for in several...

Underestimating the benefits of marine protected areas for the replenishment of fished populations

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...

Warming increases the cost of growth in a model vertebrate

**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...

Body size drives global species packing of reef fishes across spatial scales

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...

Is oxygen limitation in warming waters a valid mechanism to explain decreased body sizes in aquatic ectotherms?

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...

Global environmental drivers of marine fish egg size

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.

Fish reproductive-energy output increases disproportionately with body size

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 energetics of fish growth and how it constrains food-web trophic structure

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...

Networks in nature

Exploring methods and patterns of ecological networks.