Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
July 2025
Sturgeons, an iconic group of large fishes inhabiting marine and freshwater ecosystems, have historically had significant economic and cultural value, particularly prized for their meat and roe (caviar). Furthermore, sturgeons play a vital ecological role as mesopredators of prey fish and invertebrates. In the Danube basin, the European () and fringebarbel or ship sturgeon () are locally extinct, while beluga (), Russian (), stellate () and sterlet () sturgeon have significantly declined since the nineteenth century owing to overfishing, habitat loss and pollution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWildlife populations globally have experienced widespread historical declines due to anthropogenic and environmental impacts, yet for some species, contemporary management and conservation programmes have enabled recent recovery. The impacts of decline and recovery on genomic diversity and, vice versa, the genetic factors that contribute to conservation success or failure are rich areas for inquiry, with implications for shaping how we manage species into the future. To comprehensively characterise these processes in natural systems requires range-wide sampling and international collaboration, particularly for species with wide dispersal capabilities, broad geographic distributions, and complex regional metapopulation dynamics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Emergency cricothyrotomy is a rare but potentially life-saving procedure performed by emergency physicians. A comprehensive, dichotomous procedural checklist for emergency cricothyrotomy for emergency medicine (EM) resident education does not exist.
Objectives: We aimed to develop a checklist containing the critical steps for performing an open emergency cricothyrotomy, to assess performance of EM residents performing an open emergency cricothyrotomy using the checklist on a simulator, and to evaluate the reliability and validity of the checklist for performing the procedure.
The Arctic environment plays a critical role in the global climate system and marine biodiversity. The region's ice-covered expanses provide essential breeding and feeding grounds for a diverse assemblage of marine species, who have adapted to thrive in these harsh conditions and consequently are under threat from global warming. The bearded seal (Erignathus barbatus), including two subspecies (E.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWalrus ivory was a prized commodity in medieval Europe and was supplied by Norse intermediaries who expanded across the North Atlantic, establishing settlements in Iceland and Greenland. However, the precise sources of the traded ivory have long remained unclear, raising important questions about the sustainability of commercial walrus harvesting, the extent to which Greenland Norse were able to continue mounting their own long-range hunting expeditions, and the degree to which they relied on trading ivory with the various Arctic Indigenous peoples that they were starting to encounter. We use high-resolution genomic sourcing methods to track walrus artifacts back to specific hunting grounds, demonstrating that Greenland Norse obtained ivory from High Arctic waters, especially the North Water Polynya, and possibly from the interior Canadian Arctic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRapid global warming is severely impacting Arctic ecosystems and is predicted to transform the abundance, distribution and genetic diversity of Arctic species, though these linkages are poorly understood. We address this gap in knowledge using palaeogenomics to examine how earlier periods of global warming influenced the genetic diversity of Atlantic walrus (), a species closely associated with sea ice and shallow-water habitats. We analysed 82 ancient and historical Atlantic walrus mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes), including now-extinct populations in Iceland and the Canadian Maritimes, to reconstruct the Atlantic walrus' response to Arctic deglaciation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe deep sea has been described as the last major ecological frontier, as much of its biodiversity is yet to be discovered and described. Beaked whales (ziphiids) are among the most visible inhabitants of the deep sea, due to their large size and worldwide distribution, and their taxonomic diversity and much about their natural history remain poorly understood. We combine genomic and morphometric analyses to reveal a new Southern Hemisphere ziphiid species, Ramari's beaked whale, , whose name is linked to the Indigenous peoples of the lands from which the species holotype and paratypes were recovered.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe budding yeast is one of the most significant fungal pathogens worldwide. It proliferates in two distinct cell types: blastopores and filaments. Only cells that are able to transform from one cell type into the other are virulent in mouse disease models.
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