Hepatitis E virus infection (HEV) is an important public health concern not only in traditional endemic areas, but also in some industrialized countries where both domesticated and wild animals have been recognized as potential zoonotic reservoirs implicated in HEV transmission. While the...

Species invasions can have profound ecological impacts, including changes in patterns of distribution, abundance and diversity of native species, altering food-web dynamics and ecosystem functioning. In the marine benthic environment temperature, predation, competition for space and wave action...

A Q fever outbreak in a small animal veterinary hospital, associated with a cat caesarean section, initiated a cat seroprevalence study (n=712) that found circulating antibodies to Coxiella burnetii was highest in cattery-confined breeding cats (9.3%). These findings stimulated interest about...

Introduction of invasive species is a major threat to freshwater biodiversity. Topmouth gudgeon, pumpkinseed sunfish and black bullhead catfish have been recognised as highly invasive fish species in Croatia. However, their diet in allochthonous habitats are generally still poorly understood, and...

Plants with animal-dispersed fruits seem to overcome the barriers that limit their spread into new habitats more easily than other invasive plants and, at the same time, they pose special difficulties for containment, control or eradication. The effects of animals on plant propagules can be very...

On islands, invasive predators, particularly feral cats and rats, are key drivers of bird population decline and extinction. Diet studies can be used to assess predator impacts on prey populations. Here we first evaluated the resolution of morphological identification (Class to Species) of bird...

The functions and compositions of symbiotic bacterial communities often correlate with host ecology. Yet cause-effect relationships and the order of symbiont vs. host change remain unclear in the face of ancient symbioses and conserved host ecology. Several groups of ants exemplify this challenge,...

Variability in the feeding ecology of young fishes over short and long time scales in estuaries is likely to affect population dynamics. We studied 14 years of early stage Striped Bass feeding ecology in the Hudson River Estuary over a 25-year time span, including years in which invasive zebra...

Populations may collectively exhibit a broad diet because individuals have large diet breadths and/or because subpopulations of specialists co-occur. In social insect populations, the diet of the genetic individual, the colony, may similarly arise because workers are diet generalists or castes of...

Apex predators often have strong effects on populations of prey, and other predators. Research on predator interactions has mostly focused on closely related assemblages, especially carnivorous mammals, but strong interactions can also occur between distantly related predators. We investigated...