Regulatory Fragmentation: An Unexamined Barrier to Species Conservation Under Climate Change

Requirements for the protection or restriction of species are based on regulatory classifications such as “native” or “invasive,” which become anachronistic when climate change drives species outside of their historical geographic range. Furthermore, such regulatory classifications are inconsistent across the patchwork of land ownership that species must traverse as they move between jurisdictions or when transported by humans, which obstructs effective regional management. We surveyed the U.S. laws and regulations relevant to species movement and found that the immigration of species to new jurisdictions makes paradoxical existing regulatory language that sets the categories of species deserving protection or removal. Climate change is universal and progressing rapidly, which provides a shrinking window to reconcile regulatory language originally developed for a static environment.

New fish species added to the ichthyofauna of Laguna Ojo de Liebre, Baja California Sur, México

The Laguna Ojo de Liebre (Scammon’s lagoon) is the iconic sanctuary of the Pacific gray whale and belongs to the El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve in Baja California, México. From June 2015 to August 2016, six seasonal visits were conducted on the ichthyofauna in seven sites of the lagoon. By diving, trapping, hook & line, and gillnet commercial fishing, a total number of 39 fish species was identified belonging to 25 families. In this study a total number of eight fish species is added to the first two existing 20-year-old lists: the Gymnothorax mordax (Ayres, 1859), Apogon sp. Pomacanthus zonipectus (Gill, 1862), Balistes polylepis (Steindachner, 1876), Pareques viola (Gilbert 1898), Caranx sp., Sphoeroides lobatus (Steindachner, 1870), and the Icelinus sp. During 2015-2016, two anomalous events warmed the lagoon, and possibly, it contributed to the fish species movement from the adjacent tropical or subtropical zones. Ichthyofauna from Laguna Ojo de Liebre is reported here before the installation of reef modules as a refuge for red lobster and fish aggregation.

Modeling habitat connectivity in support of multiobjective species movement: An application to amphibian habitat systems

Reasoning about the factors underlying habitat connectivity and the inter-habitat movement of species is essential to many areas of biological inquiry. In order to better describe and understand the ways in which the landscape may support species movement, an increasing amount of research has focused on identification of paths or corridors that may be important in providing connectivity among habitat. The least-cost path problem has proven to be an instrumental analytical tool in this sense. A complicating aspect of such path identification methods is how to best reconcile and integrate the array of criteria or objectives that species may consider in traversal of a landscape. In cases where habitat connectivity is thought to be influenced or guided by multiple objectives, numerous solutions to least-cost path problems can exist, representing tradeoffs between the objectives. In practice though, identification of these solutions can be very challenging and as such, only a small proportion of them are typically examined leading to a weak characterization of habitat connectivity. To address this computational challenge, a multiobjective optimization framework is proposed. A generalizable multiobjective least-cost path model is first detailed. A non-inferior set estimation (MONISE) algorithm for identifying supported efficient solutions to the multiobjective least-cost path model is then described. However, it is well known that unsupported efficient solutions (which are equally important) can also exist, but are typically ignored given that they are more difficult to identify. Thus, to enable the identification of the full set of efficient solutions (supported and unsupported) to the multiobjective model, a multi-criteria labeling algorithm is then proposed. The developed framework is applied to assess different conceptualizations of habitat connectivity supporting amphibian movement in a wetland system. The results highlight the range of tradeoffs in characterizations of connectivity that can exist when multiple objectives are thought to contribute to movement decisions and that the number of unsupported efficient solutions (which are typically ignored) can vastly outweigh that of the supported efficient solutions.

The Research of Scottish Herring and Mackerel’s Movement Simulation

Global warming has a great effect to marine species. In this paper, the author aims to construct mathematical to simulate the movement of two species, Herring and Mackerel. In order to describe its randomness and the background of global warming, the author improves Random Walk to weighted Random Walk as the model to describe the species movement, and the weight is affected by ocean temperature. Furthermore, to make the results more persuasive, the author uses interpolation algorithm to expand the data sets. After that, the author uses the model and data to simulate the trace of two species in 50 years. The trace is during the next 50 years, Mackerel will move 22.36 kilometers while Scottish Herring will move 29.15 kilometers, which shows that the two species will move a distance that cannot be ignored. Finally, based on above results, the author gets some conclusions and gives some advice to help fisheries companies to deal with it.

Lines selected for different durations of tonic immobility have different leg lengths in the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum

Tonic immobility is an adaptive anti-predator behaviour observed in many species. This anti-predator behaviour is often correlated with a species’ movement motivation, so a relationship between the duration of tonic immobility and morphological traits supporting movement would be expected. Using the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, we carried out two-way artificial selection for the duration of tonic immobility over more than 43 generations, establishing populations with longer (L) and shorter (S) tonic immobility durations compared to those of a non-selected control (C) population. Here, we investigated differences in walking motivation and leg length between the selected populations. Walking motivation was significantly higher in beetles from the S population than that in those from the L population. Moreover, S-population beetles of both sexes had significantly longer legs than those from L and C populations. The present results suggest the evolution of longer legs in response to selection pressure for a shorter duration of tonic immobility in T. castaneum.