Ocean acidification may have deleterious effects on many species, but anticipating long-term changes in the abundance of populations will require an understanding of ocean acidification as an evolutionary force. Here I show that ocean acidification alters natural selection on offspring size and is likely to drive contemporary evolution. In a detailed study of a coastal fish species (California Grunion), I demonstrate that larval mortality is highly sensitive to ocean acidification and that mortality rates are...

Extreme climatic events may influence individual-level variability in phenotypes, survival, and reproduction, and thereby drive the pace of evolution. Climate models predict increases in the frequency of intense hurricanes, but no study has measured their impact on individual life courses within animal populations. We used 45 years of demographic data of rhesus macaques to quantify the influence of major hurricanes on reproductive life courses using multiple metrics of dynamic heterogeneity accounting for life course variability...

Coyotes (Canis latrans) in urban landscapes provide important food web functions and ecological services but can also trigger human-wildlife conflict when their diet includes anthropogenic resources or domestic pets. As adaptable omnivores, coyotes adjust their diet to their environment, routinely switching among food items to accommodate spatial and seasonal differences in availability. To evaluate coyotes’ potential impacts within the food web of urban Long Beach, California where human-wildlife conflict involving coyotes may occur, we analyzed...

A basic tenet of animal behavior is that animal groupings (e.g., schools of fishes or flocks of birds) are widely influenced by predators. Many studies have focused on communication between individuals within the same species or different species within a defined social group; but predators typically select from a number of different co-occurring species. To evaluate whether two distantly-related species with similar predators share vocal information regarding predator threats, we conducted a field experiment in...

Tidal wetlands are greatly impacted by climate change, and by the invasion of alien plant species that are being exposed to salinity changes and longer inundation periods resulting from sea level rise. To explore the capacity for the invasion of Iris pseudacorus (Yellow flag iris) to persist with sea level rise, we initiated an intercontinental study along estuarine gradients in the invaded North American range and the native European range. Data generated to support this...