Coral Reef Fish Rapidly Learn to Identify Multiple Unknown Predators upon Recruitment to the Reef

Organisms often undergo shifts in habitats as their requirements change with ontogeny

From Paradox to Missed Opportunities: French Statist Liberalism and the Euro Crisis

This paper analyzes the evolving politics of France's European commitments with a particular emphasis on the contradictions and inconsistencies within France’s position as a European leader and anchor of EMU. It argues that the competing allures of statism and liberalism, France’s vacillating commitments to Keynesianism and austerity, and France’s core partnership with Germany have generated a deeply fraught and inconsistent set of trajectories in financial and economic policy both domestically and at the European level. It supports this central claim through an empirical study of the political debates surrounding the incipient European and Economic and Monetary Union in the late 1990s and the European financial and ensuing Eurozone sovereign debt crisis after 2007. In both of these instances (but most powerfully and obviously in the latter), French policy was guided by commanding but often contradictory political-economic imperatives: French economic autonomy and political leadership within Europe, the preservation of its historic partnership with Germany as an avenue of influence in the European Union, and protecting and preserving its cherished “statist liberal” political-economic model. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this balancing strategy has become less feasible since the euro crisis and France's growing ineffectiveness at articulating an alternative vision of European economic policy has reduced the chances of a less austere future for the Euro and may well destabilize the currency union as a whole

Metamorphosing reef fishes avoid predator scent when choosing a home

Most organisms possess anti-predator adaptations to reduce their risk of being consumed, but little is known of the adaptations prey employ during vulnerable life-history transitions when predation pressures can be extreme. We demonstrate the use of a transition-specific anti-predator adaptation by coral reef fishes as they metamorphose from pelagic larvae to benthic juveniles, when over half are consumed within 48 h. Our field experiment shows that naturally settling damselfish use olfactory, and most likely innate, predator recognition to avoid settling to habitat patches manipulated to emit predator odour. Settlement to patches emitting predator odour was on average 24–43% less than to control patches. Evidence strongly suggests that this avoidance of sedentary and patchily distributed predators by nocturnal settlers will gain them a survival advantage, but also lead to non-lethal predator effects: the costs of exhibiting anti-predator adaptations. Transition-specific anti-predator adaptations, such as demonstrated here, may be widespread among organisms with complex life cycles and play an important role in prey population dynamics