de Haan, E. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2026

Renewable energy caves: water replenishment holes in offshore monopiles create novel marine habitats

The expansion of offshore renewable energy introduces artificial hard substrate, but the ecological effects may change depending on design features. For example, water replenishment holes, implemented for internal water refreshment and corrosion control, also allow colonisation of previously inaccessible monopile interiors, creating a novel semi-enclosed habitat. This study compared epifaunal communities on the interior and exterior walls of four water replenishment hole-equipped monopiles in the southern North Sea and modelled internal water quality to better understand factors shaping these communities. Vertical video transects were used to quantify percentage cover along depth gradients, while a coupled hydrodynamic-water quality model predicted vertical patterns in dissolved oxygen and particulate organic carbon over one year. Monopile interiors function as semi-enclosed, cave-like habitats with distinct environmental conditions, including darkness, restricted water flow, and vertical gradients in dissolved oxygen and particulate organic carbon. Compared to the external cover, interior communities showed reduced dominance of typical North Sea hard-substrate taxa and increased heterogeneity, with higher contributions of sponges, calcareous tube worms, and brittle stars, resembling communities reported from marine cave environments. Overall epifaunal cover was lower on the interior walls and broadly reflected vertical patterns in water quality. Organic matter accumulated on the interior seafloor, with indications of microbial mat formation. These findings suggest that the internal environmental conditions influence community development. Water replenishment hole design may therefore shape community composition inside monopiles, with implications for possible use as nature-inclusive design and environmental management. Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=78 SRC="FIGDIR/small/729839v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (43K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@13463d5org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@8660a6org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@3364d2org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@204a62_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

ecology↗

bioRxiv2017

Visual pathways from the perspective of cost functions and multi-task deep neural networks

Vision research has been shaped by the seminal insight that we can understand the higher-tier visual cortex from the perspective of multiple functional pathways with different goals. In this paper, we try to give a computational account of the functional organization of this system by reasoning from the perspective of multi-task deep neural networks. Machine learning has shown that tasks become easier to solve when they are decomposed into subtasks with their own cost function. We hypothesize that the visual system optimizes multiple cost functions of unrelated tasks and this causes the emergence of a ventral pathway dedicated to vision for perception, and a dorsal pathway dedicated to vision for action. To evaluate the functional organization in multi-task deep neural networks, we propose a method that measures the contribution of a unit towards each task, applying it to two networks that have been trained on either two related or two unrelated tasks, using an identical stimulus set. Results show that the network trained on the unrelated tasks shows a decreasing degree of feature representation sharing towards higher-tier layers while the network trained on related tasks uniformly shows high degree of sharing. We conjecture that the method we propose can be used to analyze the anatomical and functional organization of the visual system and beyond. We predict that the degree to which tasks are related is a good descriptor of the degree to which they share downstream cortical-units.

neuroscience↗