Electric fish handling gloves (FHGs) have been developed to immobilize fish during handling, with the potential benefit of reducing the time needed for sedation and recovery of fish relative to chemical anaesthetics. We examined the secondary stress responses (i.e., hematocrit...
The dear enemy effect arises when territorial animals respond more intensely to unfamiliar strangers than to familiar neighbours. This widespread behavioural phenomenon occurs because strangers represent a threat to both an animal's territory and parentage whereas neighbours represent a threat only...
The detection and monitoring of surface water and its extent are critical for understanding floodwater hazards. Flooding and undermining caused by surface water flow can result in damage to critical infrastructure and changes in ecosystems. Along major transportation corridors, such...
Populations of many aerially insectivorous birds are declining, yet conservation efforts remain focused on habitat due to an absence of data on changes in prey availability. We evaluate the potential for prey and habitat availability at multiple spatial scales to...
Context: Identifying key spatio–temporal periods of an organism’s activity is an important focus of many ecological studies. Bat activity, as assessed by passive acoustic monitoring, can be extremely variable and currently there exists no agreed-upon method for identifying periods of...
A central tenet of ecoimmunology is that an organism's environment shapes its optimal investment in immunity. For example, the benefits of acquired (relatively pathogen specific) versus innate (nonspecific) immune defenses are thought to vary with the risk of encountering familiar...
The United Nations’ (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development defines the formidable challenge of integrating historically separate economic, social, and environmental goals into a unified ‘plan of action for people, planet, and prosperity.’ We highlight the substantial contribution inland fisheries...
Upon hearing a conspecific signal, animals must assess their relationship with the signaller and respond appropriately. Territorial animals usually respond more aggressively to strangers than neighbors in a phenomenon known as the “dear enemy effect”. This phenomenon likely evolved because...
Physiologically, oxidative stress is considered a homeostatic imbalance between reactive oxygen species production and absorption. From an ecological perspective, oxidative stress may serve as an important constraint to life-history traits, such as lifespan, reproduction and the immune system, and is...
Parental care is an advantageous reproductive behavior, as the fitness of the caregiver is increased through improving the chances of its offspring’s survival. Parental care occurs in a variety of teleost fishes. The body size of parental fish and the...
Infectious disease represents an emerging threat to natural populations, particularly when hosts are more susceptible to novel parasites (allopatric) than to parasites from the local area (sympatric). This pattern could arise through evolutionary processes (host populations become adapted to their...
Breeding site fidelity has evolved in many vertebrate taxa, suggesting both that site selection has an important influence on fitness potential and that the decision to reuse a nesting site is related to the individual’s prior nesting success at that...
In the face of a changing world, there has been increasing interest in the behavioural and physiological responses of wild animals to stressors. Many factors can influence stress responsiveness, but two that have not been extensively studied during the stress-induced...
We examined whether particular years of mast seed production in sugar maple (Acer saccharum) are associated with increased likelihood of cohort recruitment success into the sapling stage over three decades of heavy browsing pressure from white-tailed deer in...
Glucocorticoid hormones facilitate responses to environmental challenges by mediating diverse physiological and behavioral changes, including resource mobilization and altered reproductive effort. Elevated glucocorticoids might indicate that an individual is facing high levels of environmental challenges and thus, elevated concentrations might be associated with...
Colonist quantity, quality, and arrival frequency can all individually drive the dynamics and extinction of new populations. However, we do not understand which has the strongest influence, nor the circumstances under which their relative importance may change. We conducted a...
Aposematism is an evolved, cross-species association between a preys’ unprofitability and the presence of conspicuous signals. Avian predators have been widely employed to understand the evolution of these warning signals However, insect predators are abundant, diverse, and highly visual foragers...
Competitive ability in plants is defined traditionally by a ‘size advantage’ hypothesis – i.e. larger species are generally expected to be more successful under competition because of greater capacity for resource capture, and thus capacity to deny resources to...
Despite a growing body of literature on the impacts of recreational fisheries on wild populations, surprisingly little is known regarding how individual differences in fish behaviour and their interaction with a baited hook influences hooking injury. We used an underwater...
Employing science-based best angling practices is important for sustainable catch-and-release fisheries. In situations where fish lose equilibrium (unable to maintain upright posture to swim in a coordinated manner), anglers often provide assisted ventilation by hand, which typically involves maneuvering fish to...
We tracked 20 males and 2 females breeding in four regions of Canada using geolocators. Wintering locations ranged from the gulf coast of central Mexico to Costa Rica. Individuals from the northern-most breeding site and females tended to winter furthest...
The drowning of freshwater turtles following incidental capture in fishing gear has the potential to cause population declines. Fyke nets can be equipped with bycatch reduction devices that enable the escape of turtles before they drown. We employed quantitative and...
The nonconsumptive consequences of predators on prey behavior, survival, and demography have recently garnered significant attention by ecologists. However, the impacts of top predators on free-ranging prey are challenging to evaluate because the most common fright response for prey is...
Bycatch, the incidental capture of non‐target organisms, occurs in most commercial fisheries. Although immediate bycatch mortality is frequently documented in fisheries, detrimental sub‐lethal effects and potential post‐release mortality remain largely unknown despite the potential population‐level consequences. Turtles are captured as...
Bluegill sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus) are one of the classic systems for studying male alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs) in teleost fishes. In this species, there are two distinct life histories: parental and cuckolder, encompassing three reproductive tactics, parental, satellite...
Ecological light pollution occurs when artificial lights disrupt the natural regimes of individual organisms or their ecosystems. Increasing development of shoreline habitats leads to increased light pollution (e.g., from cottages, docks, automobile traffic), which could impact the ecology of littoral...
The ideal free distribution concept predicts that organisms will distribute themselves between habi-tats in a density-dependent manner so that individuals, on average, achieve the same fitness in each habitat. In ecto-therms, environmental temperature has a strong impact on fitness, but...
Within species of birds, variation in plumage may allow potential mates or competitive rivals to quickly assess the quality of an individual. Little is known about the role of white tail feather patches (“tail white”) in male Cerulean Warblers (...
The concept of behavioural syndromes (i.e. correlations between behavioural traits) has provided an important framework for understanding individual variation in animal behaviour and its link to individual variation in physiology and life-history traits. The pace-of-life syndrome concept posits that behavioural, physiological...
Many territorial animals are less aggressive towards neighbours than they are towards strangers. This phenomenon is known as the ‘dear enemy’ effect and it occurs because strangers represent a considerably higher threat to territory take-over compared to neighbours. Some evidence...
A sample of woody angiosperm species was used to test a central prediction of the ‘leafing intensity premium’ hypothesis: higher leafing intensity (number of leaves produced per unit dry mass of shoot vegetative tissue produced in the same growing season)...
Sexually selected traits can signal an individual's ability to contribute offspring care. Differential allocation theory posits that when these same traits also influence brood value, it may be adaptive for partners to adjust care in response to their mates' traits. Evaluating...
Propagule pressure has consistently been identified as a primary factor in invader success, and reducing it can be one of the most effective methods for preventing the establishment of non-native species. However, when policy is implemented to reduce propagule pressure...
Parental care is an essential life-history component of reproduction for many animal species, and it entails a suite of behavioural and physiological investments to enhance offspring survival. These investments can incur costs to the parent, reducing their energetic and physiological...
Each remote sensing technique has its unique set of strengths and weaknesses, but by combining techniques the classification accuracy can be increased. The goal of this project is to underline the strengths and weaknesses of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), LiDAR...
Freshwater ecosystems are threatened by a wide range of anthropogenic infrastructure related to hydropower, irrigation, municipal withdrawals, and industrial cooling. Technology can be used to mitigate the loss of fish associated with such infrastructure by exploiting the sensory physiology of...
Studies of community structure and co-occurrence patterns rely on the premise that community data reflect where species successfully grow and which species they grow with. However, plant censuses generally do not distinguish between species with reproductive individuals and those...
The North American invasion of a non-native mysid, Hemimysis anomala, has been expanding since 2006, with the first inland lake invasions detected for Oneida Lake in 2009 and Seneca Lake in 2010. Although we know that Hemimysis primarily consumes...
Alternative metrics exist for representing variation in plant body size, but the vast majority of previous research for herbaceous plants has focused on dry mass. Dry mass provides a reasonably accurate and easily measured estimate for comparing relative capacity to...
Through manipulations of sensory functions, researchers have evaluated the various mechanisms by which migratory fish, particularly in lotic systems, locate natal spawning grounds. Comparatively less work has occurred on the ways by which fish in lentic systems locate spawning sites...
To generate mortality estimates for fish that are captured and released in recreational and commercial fisheries, it is common to temporarily hold fish in captivity. Typically, captured fish are placed in some form of pen, cage or tank with control...
Characterizing the genetic and behavioural consequences of contact between previously geographically isolated lineages provides insights into the mechanisms underlying diversification and ultimately speciation. The spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer) is a widespread Nearctic chorus frog with six divergent mitochondrial...
Dispersal of native species from the regional pool can recover invaded communities to a pre-invaded state by supplementing declining populations or providing resistant species. However, dispersal may also exacerbate the negative effects of an invader. Introduced species can open or...
Recently, there has been growing recognition that fish harvesting practices can have important impacts on the phenotypic distributions and diversity of natural populations through a phenomenon known as fisheries-induced evolution. Here we experimentally show that two common recreational angling techniques...
The contemporary tackle box for recreational angling is packed with lures that cover the full spectrum of colours with the assumption that colour influences fishing success. Yet, there is little research that identifies how lure colour might influence capture rates...
Interactions between multiple anthropogenic stressors can have unexpected synergistic or antagonistic effects, making it difficult to predict their combined effects using single‐stressor studies. The interaction between invasive consumers and nutrient enrichment is particularly important as both stressors frequently co‐occur, and...
Using coverboards to monitor herpetofauna is common practice, yet few studies have formally tested the efficacy of using coverboards. We tested whether using coverboards on survey plots increased the number of small snakes detected in eastern Ontario, Canada. We set...
Measuring habitat suitability is important in conservation and in wildlife management. Measuring the abundance or presence–absence of a species in various habitats is not sufficient to measure habitat suitability because these metrics can be poor predictors of population success. Therefore...
Long-term studies in Ontario, Canada on Largemouth Bass Micropterus salmoides and Smallmouth Bass M. dolomieu have demonstrated that angling nesting males (both catch and harvest and catch and release) can have negative impacts on the reproductive success for the captured...
One of the primary factors associated with mortality in catch-and-release recreational fisheries is depth of hook position relative to the snout, with deeper hooking locations (i.e., gullet) increasing risk of injury to vital tissues. As a result, there have been...
Commercially available electrosedation apparatuses (e.g., the Smith‐Root Portable Electroanesthesia System [PES]) are growing in popularity within the fisheries research community. This technology can be used to immobilize fish rapidly and does not require a withdrawal period before fish are released...
Tradeoffs between hypoxia tolerance and aerobic exercise performance appear to exist in some fish taxa, even though both of these traits are often associated with a high O2 transport capacity. We examined the physiological basis for this potential tradeoff...
Stable isotope analysis is frequently used to examine resource use in wild populations, but it often involves invasive or lethal methods of collecting tissue samples. The development of less invasive or nonlethal sampling techniques will expand the possible uses of...
Unpredictable and inclement weather is increasing in strength and frequency, challenging organisms to respond adaptively. One way in which animals respond to environmental challenges is through the secretion of glucocorticoid stress hormones. These hormones mobilize energy stores and suppress non-essential...
Populations of invasive species tend to have fewer parasites in their introduced ranges than in their native ranges and are also thought to have fewer parasites than native prey. This ‘release’ from parasites has unstudied implications for native predators feeding...
According to traditional theory, success in competition between plant species generally involves a ‘size-advantage’. We predicted therefore that plants with larger body size should impose greater limits on the number of species — especially relatively small ones — that can...
Bycatch of non‐target species in commercial fishing nets can have adverse impacts on their populations. Freshwater turtle populations are particularly susceptible to increases in adult mortality, and freshwater turtles are among the most threatened vertebrates.
Current methods of fish epithelial injury detection are limited to gross macroscopic examination that has a subjective bias as well as an inability to reliably quantify the degree of injury. Fluorescein, a presumptive test for blood, has been shown to...
In short-lived animals, innate immunity is an important component of fitness and quality. Although receivers cannot generally assess a signaler's immune function directly, sexually selected displays such as birdsong may reflect past or current condition. We investigated the degree to...
