Biology subjects

Fenberg, P. B.

Publications and source records attributed to Fenberg, P. B..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Tropicalisation of rocky shore gastropod communities along the Baja California Peninsula

Tropicalisation is rapidly restructuring marine communities globally. Despite extensive research in subtidal habitats, the extent of tropicalisation and its impact on rocky intertidal communities remains poorly understood. Here we integrated contemporary field surveys with genetic barcoding, historic surveys, museum collections, and fossil records to document changes in the rocky shore gastropod communities along 8 degrees of latitude (approximately 3,120 km of coastline) of the Baja California Peninsula. We detected poleward range expansions of 30 tropical and subtropical species, and trailing-edge retractions of 13 temperate species, with some range shifts occurring across long-standing biogeographic boundaries. Fossil evidence reveals that several range-extending species previously occupied latitudes beyond their modern distributions during Pleistocene warm periods, suggesting that contemporary expansions echo historical responses to climatic warming, albeit under accelerated rates. Using Lottia gigantea as a case study, we demonstrated early range retractions can be marked by shifts in size-frequency distributions demonstrating declines in abundance, and loss of small individuals suggestive of reduced recruitment. We showed that rocky intertidal systems are sensitive to climate-driven range shifts, and highlighted the importance of integrating historical, palaeontological and contemporary data to detect early ecological and evolutionary consequences of tropicalisation. Continued monitoring combined with molecular approaches is crucial for predicting and managing biodiversity responses under ongoing climate change.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Applying computer vision to digitised natural history collections for climate change research: temperature-size responses in British butterflies

O_LINatural history collections (NHCs) are invaluable resources for understanding biotic response to global change. Museums around the world are currently imaging specimens, capturing specimen data, and making them freely available online. In parallel to the digitisation effort, there have been great advancements in computer vision (CV): the computer trained automated recognition/detection, and measurement of features in digital images. Applying CV to digitised NHCs has the potential to greatly accelerate the use of NHCs for biotic response to global change research. In this paper, we apply CV to a very large, digitised collection to test hypotheses in an established area of biotic response to climate change research: temperature-size responses. C_LIO_LIWe develop a CV pipeline (Mothra) and apply it to the NHM iCollections of British butterflies (>180,000 specimens). Mothra automatically detects the specimen in the image, sets the scale, measures wing features (e.g., forewing length), determines the orientation of the specimen (pinned ventrally or dorsally), and identifies the sex. We pair these measurements and meta-data with temperature records to test how adult size varies with temperature during the immature stages of species and to assess patterns of sexual-size dimorphism across species and families. C_LIO_LIMothra accurately measures the forewing lengths of butterfly specimens and compared to manual baseline measurements, Mothra accurately determines sex and forewing lengths of butterfly specimens. Females are the larger sex in most species and an increase in adult body size with warm monthly temperatures during the late larval stages is the most common temperature size response. These results confirm suspected patterns and support hypotheses based on recent studies using a smaller dataset of manually measured specimens. C_LIO_LIWe show that CV can be a powerful tool to efficiently and accurately extract phenotypic data from a very large collection of digital NHCs. In the future, CV will become widely applied to digital NHC collections to advance ecological and evolutionary research and to accelerate the use of NHCs for biotic response to global change research. C_LI

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Nectar robbing in the trainbearers (Lesbia, Trochilidae)

Many flower visitors engage in floral larceny, a suite of so-called illegitimate visits in which foragers take nectar without providing pollination services. The data on prevalence of illegitimate visits among hummingbirds, as well as the total proportion of foraging and diet that such visits comprise is broadly lacking. Here, we report the occurrence of nectar larceny in both currently recognized species of trainbearers and analyze the proportion of plant visits categorized by mode of interaction as: primary robbing, secondary robbing, theft, and/or pollination. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first published report identifying robbing in these species. We augment our original field observations using a trove of data from citizen science databases and literature. Although it is difficult to distinguish primary vs. secondary robbing and theft vs. pollination, we conservatively estimate that ca. 40% of the recorded nectar foraging visits involve nectar robbing. Males appear to engage in robbing marginally more than females, but further studies are necessary to confidently examine the multi-way interactions among sex, species, mode of visitation, and other factors. We discuss the significance of these findings in the context of recent developments in study of nectar foraging, larceny, and pollination from both avian and plant perspectives.

ecology↗