Excerpt from UW News: “Thousands of whales are injured or killed each year after being struck by ships, particularly the large container vessels that ferry 80% of the world’s traded goods across the oceans. Collisions are the leading cause of death worldwide for large whale species. Yet global data on ship strikes of whales are hard to come by — […]
Ship collision risk threatens whales across the world’s oceans Read More »
From the highlights section: “Biologging sensors enable broad-scale, high-resolution measurements of the physiological, behavioral, demographic, social, and environmental interactions underpinning patterns in nature. We present a framework, case studies, and outstanding questions for integrating biologging data with theoretical concepts to facilitate process explanation and prediction.” Authors: Roxanne S. Beltran, A. Marm Kilpatrick, Simona Picardi, Briana Abrahms, Gabriel M. Barrile, William
Maximizing biological insights from instruments attached to animals Read More »
Congratulations to Leigh West, Dr. Abrahms’s graduate student, who just recently published her first paper as lead author. Her research article, “Droughts reshape apex predator space use and intraguild overlap,” was published in the Journal of Animal Ecology on October 4th, and also serves as the second chapter of her dissertation. This is an exciting milestone for Leigh as she
Abrahms Lab grad student Leigh West publishes first article Read More »
From the Abstract:Droughts are increasing in frequency and severity globally due to climate change, leading to changes in resource availability that may have cascading effects on animal ecology. Although several studies have demonstrated the ecological impacts of drought, the behavioural responses of individuals that scale up to these broader-scale effects are not well known, particularly among animals in top trophic
Droughts reshape apex predator space use and intraguild overlap Read More »
From the abstract: “Here, we review studies of animal behaviour at the spatial–social interface to understand and predict how human disturbance affects animal movement, distribution and intraspecific interactions, with consequences for the conservation of populations and ecosystems. By understanding the spatial–social mechanisms linking human disturbance to conservation outcomes, we can better design management interventions to mitigate undesired consequences of disturbance.”
Anthropogenic impacts at the interface of animal spatial and social behaviour Read More »
From the abstract: “We propose three key innovations that incrementally build upon each other […] These conceptual innovations cast our understanding of the relationships between social and spatial dimensions of animal ecology in a new light, allowing a more holistic understanding and clearer hypothesis development for animal behaviour.” Authors: Simona Picardi, Briana L. Abrahms and Jerod A. MerkleJournal: Philosophical Transactions
Scale at the interface of spatial and social ecology Read More »
“We show that the potential spatial overlap of global human populations and 22,374 terrestrial vertebrate species will increase across ~56.6% and decrease across only ~11.8% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface by 2070 […] The strong spatial heterogeneity of future human-wildlife overlap found in our study makes it clear that local context is imperative to consider, and more targeted area-based land-use
Global expansion of human-wildlife overlap in the 21st century Read More »
“Using a multidecadal dataset on Magellanic penguins, we show that despite strong selection on body size, some environmental conditions favored larger bodies, and others favored smaller bodies, thus preventing consistent evolution in one direction or the other […] Such findings highlight that fluctuating selection can be driven by environmental variability, and these processes could eliminate the possibility of evolutionary rescue
“Social information is predicted to enhance the quality of animals’ migratory decisions in dynamic ecosystems, but the relative benefits of social information in the long-range movements of marine megafauna are unknown. In particular, whether and how migrants use nonlocal information gained through social communication at the large spatial scale of oceanic ecosystems remains unclear. […]” Authors: Stephanie Dodson, William K.
Long-distance communication can enable collective migration in a dynamic seascape Read More »
Authors: Gemma Carroll, Briana Abrahms, Stephanie Brodie & Megan A. Cimino Journal: Nature Ecology and Evolution DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02454-0 “Climate change is driving a rapid redistribution of life on Earth. Variability in the rates, magnitudes and directions of species’ shifts can alter spatial overlap between predators and prey, with the potential to decouple trophic interactions. Although phenological mismatches between predator requirements
Spatial match-mismatch between predators and prey under climate change Read More »
