Learned societies play a vital role in fostering interactions that are important in scholarly discourse and the advancement of biological sciences. However, they now face threats from declining funding and membership, shifting disciplinary boundaries, changing approaches towards digital communication, and academic marketization. We outline the historical development of these societies and propose ways to sustain them. Key considerations include improving meetings, adapting publishing models, ensuring financial stability, expanding membership, strengthening outreach, and managing increasingly broad remits. Our main aim is to examine how regional learned societies can maintain their roles to support scientific progress and enrich broader society.
The goal of this research was to examine the anthropometric characteristics and define the somatotypes of female junior contemporary dancers. The study included a total of 62 dancers, with a mean age of +/-.113.16(years + SD) and an average dance experience of 5.85 +/- 2.56 (years + SD). According the instructions of the Heath-Carter protocol for defining somatotypes, 10 anthropometric measurements were taken by a trained researcher. The somatotypes of the young dancers were calculated and obtained using3. TheR 4.2. main finding of the study indicates that the dancers have moderate muscle mass and a lean body, which corresponds to theed balanc mesomorph-ectomorph somatotype, aligning with the physical and aesthetic demands of contemporary dance.
Dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and methanethiol (MeSH) emissions from South Pacific surface seawater were determined in deck board Air-Sea Interface Tanks during the Sea2Cloud voyage in March 2020. The measured fluxes from water to headspace (F) varied with water mass type, with lowest fluxes observed with Subtropical and Subantarctic waters and highest fluxes from Frontal waters. Measured DMS fluxes were consistent with fluxes calculated using a two-layer model and seawater DMS concentrations. The MeSH:DMS flux ratio was 11%-18% across the three water mass types, confirming that MeSH may represent a significant unaccounted contribution to the atmospheric sulfur budget, with potentially important implications for marine aerosol formation and growth in models. Combining data from the ASITs and ambient surface seawater identified significant Spearman rank correlations for both dissolved DMS and MeSH with nanophytoplankton cell abundance (pvalue < 0.012), suggesting an important role for this phytoplankton size class in determining regional DMS and MeSH emissions. Applying a nanophytoplankton-based parameterization to estimate DMSw provided good agreement with a recent DMS climatology. Consequently, the observed relationship between DMSw, MeSHw and nanophytoplankton cell abundances may be applicable for modeling atmospheric fluxes.
The biological carbon pump contributes to set the magnitude of carbon sequestration in the oceans' interior. Estimating the relative contribution of microbial versus zooplankton‐mediated processes to particulate organic carbon (POC) flux attenuation provides insights into how this pump functions. Our study took place during the high productivity summer period in the Subantarctic and Polar Front Zone. In the upper mesopelagic (i.e., 180–300 m depth), we concurrently measured the downward POC flux, particle size and morphology, microbial remineralization rates and estimated size‐specific sinking velocities. These concomitant measurements revealed two different export systems, dominated by fecal material in the Subantarctic, and phyto‐aggregates in polar waters. These two systems were characterized by similar low particle sinking velocities (∼10 m d −1 ), while microbial remineralization rates differed by an order of magnitude. Higher microbial remineralization rates in the Subantarctic (0.11 d −1 ), compared to polar waters (0.04 d −1 ), were likely driven by the confounding effect of temperature and particle characteristics. Despite this difference in microbial remineralization rates, these two export systems were characterized by relatively similar transfer efficiencies, suggesting that microbes had differing influences. A comparison of microbially mediated (i.e., scaled using observed remineralization rates) with total POC flux attenuation (i.e., driven by the dual impact of microbes and flux‐feeders) revealed a higher microbial contribution to the flux attenuation in the upper mesopelagic of the subantarctic compared to the polar region. This deconstruction of the flux attenuation revealed an increasing influence of microbes on POC degradation with depth to become the predominant actor in the lower mesopelagic.
The susceptibility of species to habitat changes depends on which ecological drivers shape individual fitness components. To date, only a few studies have quantified fitness components such as the Lifetime Reproductive Success across multiple generations in wild marine species. Because of a long-term sampling effort, such information is available for the population of wild orange clownfish, Amphiprion percula, from Kimbe Island (Papua New Guinea). Previous work on the wild orange clownfish near Kimbe Island suggests that there is little adaptive potential and that variation in LRS is mainly driven by a breeder’s habitat. Whether the host anemone species, geographic location, density or depth contributed to LRS remains however unknown because they were combined into a unique variable. We tested whether it is the ecology or the spatial distribution of clownfish that shaped the individual variation of a local fitness component, which would affect the population self-recruitment process and ultimately the maintenance of this wild population. Our spatially explicit analysis disentangled the role of these factors. We found that the host anemone species had an impact on wild clownfish LRS independently from their spatial distribution. The spatial distribution nevertheless had an impact on its own, as reflected by the spatial autocorrelation of LRS. Depth and density of anemones did not show a significant impact. Our findings imply that this clownfish population is susceptible to modifications of the spatial distribution and local assembly of anemone species
