Andrew S Maurer

NOAA - Southwest Fisheries Science Center · Marine Mammal and Turtle Division

Sea turtles present a model for the potential impacts of climate change on imperiled species, with projected warming generating concern about their persistence. Various sea turtle life-history traits are affected by temperature; most strikingly, warmer egg incubation temperatures cause female-biased sex ratios and higher embryo mortality. Predictio...

One characteristic of global change is an increase in the frequency and magnitude of algae blooms. Although a large body of work has documented severe ecological impacts, such as mortality due to toxins or hypoxia, less research has described sublethal effects that may still affect population dynamics. Here, we focus on blooming Sargassum macroalga...

Natural habitats have been converted to urban areas across the globe such that many landscapes now represent matrices of developed and protected lands. As urbanization continues to expand, associated pressures on wildlife will increase, including effects on animals in adjacent protected habitats. For prey species (e.g., ungulates), an understanding...

Adult female sea turtles are highly migratory, moving between foraging and nesting areas that can be thousands of kilometers apart. Conserving sea turtles and their habitats therefore depends on knowledge of space use across these migration-linked environments. Here, we describe migratory behavior of hawksbill sea turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata),...

Global environmental change has featured a rise in macroalgae blooms. These events generate immense amounts of biomass that can subsequently arrive on shorelines. Such a scenario has been playing out since 2011 in the tropical and subtropical Atlantic, where Sargassum spp. have been causing periodic ‘golden tides’ in coastal habitats. Here we descr...

Relative organic content in sediment is an important determinant of ecological processes, but it can be difficult to quantify in the field. Here, we present evidence that relative organic matter content of sand may be inferred from relative coloration. For 50 sand samples collected from a beach on Long Island, Antigua, West Indies, we characterized...

The rapid expansion of urban land across the globe presents new and numerous opportunities for invasive species to spread and flourish. Ecologists historically rejected urban ecosystems as important environments for ecology and evolution research but are beginning to recognize the importance of these systems in shaping the biology of invasion. Urba...

The endangered Key Largo woodrat (Neotoma floridana smalli) is a packrat. Nights are spent making round trips between nests and distant foraging sites to gather sticks, seeds, and other decorative items to place inside or atop their nests. Interestingly, this stick- nest building behavior appears to be plastic (flexible). Surveys conducted as recen...

Widespread human development has led to the proliferation of artificial light at night, an increasingly recognized but poorly understood component of anthropogenic global change. Animals specialized to diurnal activity are presented opportunities to use this night-light niche, but the ecological consequences are largely unknown. While published rec...

Here we describe the effects of beach morphological features on loggerhead (Caretta caretta) nesting behavior on the barrier islands of the north-central Gulf of Mexico. Our results show that loggerhead crawl length decreases as beach slope increases, and our data comparing nest crawls (resulting in egg laying) versus false crawls (emergence onto t...

Camera traps are commonly used to study mammal ecology and they occasionally capture previously undocumented species interactions. The key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) is an endangered endemic subspecies of the Florida Keys, where it exists with few predators. We obtained a camera trap sequence of 80 photos in which a key deer interacted w...

The Key Largo woodrat (Neotoma floridana smalli) and Key Largo cotton mouse (Peromyscus gossypinus allapaticola) are federally endangered subspecies endemic to the tropical hardwood hammocks of Key Largo, Florida. Woodrats are considered generalists in habitat and diet, yet a steady decline in natural stick nests and capture rates over the past sev...

The Snapping Turtle, Chelydra serpentina (Linnaeus 1758), is native to North America, from southeastern Canada, along the southwestern edge of the Rocky Mountains and throughout the eastern United States (Ernst and Lovich 2009). Although C. serpentina has been observed and studied throughout peninsular Florida, it has never been recorded in the Flo...