Don’t mess with this guy, he’s got New York street smarts. By US Government [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s Friday and that means that it’s time for our Friday link dump, where we highlight some recent papers (and other stuff) that we found interesting but didn’t have the time to write an entire post about. If you think there’s something we missed, or have something to say, please share in the comments section!

Marah Hardt has a nice post on Scientific American on the dangers of removing large female fish from marine populations, an issue associated with overfishing and one of the causes of declining stocks.

A new study in PNAS maps the carbon storage of Peru’s forests on a hectare scale, providing high-resolution data for policy makers tasked with managing the nation’s forests.  – Nate Johnson

Just coming out in FrEE this week is a paper looking at how to improve trait-based modeling approaches to maintenance of diversity in phytoplankton communities.

If E.O. Wilson had been born in NYC, we might have figured this out decades ago. A new paper in Insect Conservation and Diversity shows that New York City has mega-international diversity of ants as well as people (well the paper talk about ants, I think the latter is self-evident). Moreover, ant diversity in Manhattan varies with environmental stress similarly to that in less-modified habitats. I just assumed life was uniformly terrible for ants everywhere in cities. Maybe they it would improve models further to include density of children armed with magnifying glasses as a predictor? – Emily Grason

November 14, 2014