The seafloor from a trait perspective. A comprehensive life history dataset of soft sediment macrozoobenthos.

Biological trait analysis (BTA) is a valuable tool for evaluating changes in community diversity and its link to ecosystem processes as well as environmental and anthropogenic perturbations. Trait-based analytical techniques like BTA rely on standardised datasets of species traits. However, there are currently only a limited number of datasets available for marine macrobenthos that contain trait data across multiple taxonomic groups. Here, we present an open-access dataset of 16 traits for 235 macrozoobenthic species recorded throughout multiple sampling campaigns of the Dutch Wadden Sea; a dynamic soft bottom system where humans have long played a substantial role in shaping the coastal environment. The trait categories included in this dataset cover a variety of life history strategies that are tightly linked to ecosystem functioning and the resilience of communities to (anthropogenic) perturbations and can advance our understanding of environmental changes and human impacts on the functioning of soft bottom systems.

Adaptive changes in sexual signalling in response to urbanization.

Urbanization can cause species to adjust their sexual displays, because the effectiveness of mating signals is influenced by environmental conditions. Despite many examples that show that mating signals in urban conditions differ from those in rural conditions, we do not know whether these differences provide a combined reproductive and survival benefit to the urban phenotype. Here we show that male túngara frogs have increased the conspicuousness of their calls, which is under strong sexual and natural selection by signal receivers, as an adaptive response to city life. The urban phenotype consequently attracts more females than the forest phenotype, while avoiding the costs that are imposed by eavesdropping bats and midges, which we show are rare in urban areas. Finally, we show in a translocation experiment that urban frogs can reduce risk of predation and parasitism when moved to the forest, but that forest frogs do not increase their sexual attractiveness when moved to the city. Our findings thus reveal that urbanization can rapidly drive adaptive signal change via changes in both natural and sexual selection pressures.