Kaustuv Roy's research while affiliated with University of California, San Diego and other places

... Additional work has commenced on more ethical relations to echinoderms in respect to harvesting wild populations and their use in research (Micael et al., 2016;Crespi-Abril & Rubilar, 2023) as well as mollusks in the context of certification (Boyd et al., 2005). And, even if bivalves appear to be one of the most sustainable food sources in mariculture (Jacquet, 2017), little is still known regarding which species, including those cultivated, are most vulnerable to extinction (Huang et al., 2023). Regarding the plight of seaweed, ethical frameworks focused on the welfare of macro-or microalgae remain rather limited. ...

... Entering these data into the simple, freely-available spreadsheet provided by Rivadeneira and colleagues [25,119], under a constant sampling effort, the upper boundary of a 95 % confidence interval calculated with Solow's frequentist method [106] is 2017. This method tends to underestimate time to extinction, so a better option is the optimal linear estimation [120], which is unbiased, accurate with more than ten sightings and robust against false extinctions [25,109,121]. ...

... Even though the fossil record might not have all the pieces of past ecosystems, it still has the data to inform on how ecosystems are affected by climate and sea level change and how organisms respond to gradual or rapid change, as well as surviving and recovering from mass extinctions (Valentine, 1989;Valentine and Jablonski, 1991). Using fossil data from the entire Cenozoic Era, temperature change increases extinction rates (Edie et al., 2018), which does not bode well for our animal species, Homo sapiens. ...

... Some species are very widespread, whereas others are only known from a smaller geographic area [7,15]. The Coral Triangle is the biodiversity hotspot for scleractinian corals [16,17], with the Red Sea as a secondary centre of biodiversity [17]. Geographic range shifts are thought to play a critical role in generating the observed species diversity gradients on coral reefs [16], however for many invertebrates, including gall crabs, these distribution ranges need to be studied in more detail [7,18]. ...

... Moreover, the unique evolutionary history of each biological taxon in mountainous regions could exert a profound influence on local biodiversity [20][21][22][23] . It is clear that an integrated framework is needed for the prediction of montane biodiversity 20,22,24 , and it should include ecological processes (e.g., survival, competition, and niche differentiation) 25 , evolutionary processes (e.g., species divergence and extinction) 26,27 , and geological processes (e.g., orogeny and lithosphere cycling) 17,28 . A recent attempt at such a framework, the 'mountain geobiodiversity hypothesis' (MGH), was first proposed to explain the biodiversity of the Tibeto-Himalayan region 2,29 and then extended to explain the origin of montane plant diversity at a global scale 3 . ...

... The choice of branching model-whether lineages split through budding or bifurcation-can dramatically affect how macroevolutionary dynamics are inferred from phylogenies by changing estimated ages of lineage origination [1][2][3][4][5][6][7], and thus the inferred pace of evolution. In the commonly used bifurcating model, the daughter lineage with the older first occurrence in the fossil record constrains the minimum age of a given node (figure 1a). ...

... Despite a lack of clear criteria, cryptic lineages are currently reported across almost all taxonomic groups, from unicellular eukaryotes to vertebrates 1 . Evolutionary processes that prevent or erode detectable morphological changeand may therefore result in cryptic lineage evolution-can be classified into four categories 197,198 : (1) recent divergence, indicating that insufficient time has passed for morphological differences to accumulate 7 ; (2) parallelism, which occurs when phylogenetically unrelated species occupied common morpho-spaces and evolved into near-identical morphologies 7,199 ; (3) convergence, which describes independent evolution of similar morphologies from dissimilar ancestors 7,199 ; and (4) stasis, indicating the retention of high degrees of morphological similarity, in which ancestral traits (that is, symplesiomorphies) exist for millions of years 7 . Each of these forces probably contributes to cryptic lineage evolution, but their relative contributions require further exploration 197 . ...

... The analysis of diversity and disparity across mass extinction events reveals that selectivity patterns impart distinct signatures in the fossil record (Fig. 3). Increasing evidence that some morphological traits, such as size and complexity, are linked to higher extinction rates in both ancient and modern events 65-67 suggests that morphological studies of fossils can help to assess modern extinction risks [68][69][70] . ...

... Increasingly, the accessibility of molecular markers and analytical advances in phylogenetic methods have spawned several "supertree" and "supermatrix" phylogenies that include more extensive species sampling (Kerr, 2005;Huang, 2012;Huang and Roy, 2015;Kitahara et al., 2016;Hartmann et al., 2017;Gault et al., 2021). These phylogenetic reconstructions have addressed questions spanning different biological disciplines, ranging from conservation prioritisation to ancestral state reconstruction. ...

... One salient result of these scaling relationships across broad geographic dimensions is the ecogeographic pattern referred to as Bergmann's rule-first articulated in 1847 by Carl Bergmann (14). Mammals and a variety of other vertebrates often tend to exhibit a trend toward increased body size along latitudinal and elevational gradients [i.e., their body size increases as we move toward regions of colder climates (15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)]. Paleoecologists have detected this to be an ancient pattern in some mammals, with some notable research reporting a temporal (time-for-space) corollary of the rule, where body size of particular species of mammals decreased as temperatures warmed during previous periods of natural climate change (e.g., during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) and the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 (ETM2) (25,26) and more recently during climatic cycles of the Pleistocene Epoch and during the Early Holocene (3,27). ...