Understanding climate change impacts on top predators is fundamental to marine biodiversity conservation, due to their increasingly threatened populations and their importance in marine ecosystems. We conducted a systematic review of the effects of climate change (prolonged, directional change) and climate variability on seabirds and marine mammals. We extracted data from 484 studies (4808 published studies were reviewed), comprising 2215 observations on demography, phenology, distribution, diet, behaviour, body condition and physiology. The likelihood of concluding...

This is the global dataset used for the Campbell et al. (2021) paper “Testing Bergmann’s Rule in marine copepods”. The dataset includes the mean length of copepods weighted by abundance found in 97,830 continuous plankton recorder (CPR) samples. Further, it contains satellite observations for sea surface temperature, chlorophyll-a, and dissolved oxygen (see paper for details). It was a massive collaborative effort to get this dataset assembled by the Global Alliance of CPR Surveys (GACS 2011,...

We tested the response of algal epifauna to the direct effects of predation and the indirect consequences of habitat change due to grazing and nutrient supply through upwelling using an abundant intertidal rhodophyte, Gelidium pristoides. We ran a mid-shore field experiment at four sites (two upwelling sites interspersed with two non-upwelling sites) along 450 km of the south coast of South Africa. The experiment was started in June 2014 and ran until June 2015. Four...

Sexual competition is increasingly recognized as an important selective pressure driving species distributions. However, few studies have investigated the relative importance of inter- vs. intrapopulation competition in relation to habitat availability and selection. To explain spatial segregation between sexes that often occurs in non-territorial and central place foragers, such as seabirds, two hypotheses are commonly used. The ‘competitive exclusion’ hypothesis states that dominant individuals should exclude subordinate individuals through direct competition whereas the ’niche divergence’...

Earth’s deep oceans remains less well understood than the surface of Mars. Beaked whales (ziphiids) are among the most visible inhabitants of the abyss, due to their large size and worldwide distribution, yet their diversity and ecology remain obscure. We combine genomic and morphometric analyses to reveal a new Southern Hemisphere ziphiid species, Ramari’s beaked whale, Mesoplodon eueu, whose name is linked to the Indigenous people of the lands from which the species holotype and...