Sea turtles are threatened globally. Their conservation requires, not just scientists and governments, but communities as well. Conservationists have been developing ways to reduce tensions between governments, biologists, and local communities. While community-based conservation has been implemented successfully in certain cases, work must be done to acknowledge the spiritual values of nature to garner more support for conservation from local communities. For this reason, we chose to analyze how sea turtles have been viewed spiritually in Latin America and globally throughout history by performing a literature review. Many coastal communities have centuries old spiritual beliefs regarding sea turtles. Furthermore, we conducted a case study in Ostional, Costa Rica, a village known for its sea turtle conservation, as well as its controversial sea turtle egg harvesting. From this study, which utilized surveys and interviews, we learned that spirituality is a motivator for conservation for the people of Ostional. Thus, we suggest that spirituality should be utilized as an appeal for local communities to support local conservation efforts. Governments and scientists should include spirituality in community-based conservation discourse. Further studies should assess how best to apply spiritual appeals in this discourse and its effectiveness overall, as well as among different age demographics.

The Phoenix metro area has become increasingly more urbanized over the past few decades, changing the pressures on native lizards to navigate these novel environments. Due to effects such as the Urban Heat Island, decreased vegetation cover, increased temperatures, and general changes in substrate types between environments, urban lizards have a variety of unique environmental pressures acting on them compared to their traditional habitats. In this study, I examined various morphological features in the common side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana) and the ornate tree lizard (Urosaurus ornatus) to determine if these novel pressures in urban environments have significantly changed the phenotypic expression of these features as compared to a non-urban environment. The morphological features examined were weight, head length and width, femur, tibia, foot, and toe length, arm, forearm, hand, and finger length, and snout-vent (SVL), tail, and total length, along with various proportional comparisons between related traits. I hypothesized that both common side-blotched lizards and ornate tree lizards would see an increase in mass and snout-vent length, an increase in tail length, and increase in head thickness, and a decrease in limb length in urban environments as compared non-urban environments. It was found that in common-side blotched lizards, while urban individuals tended to be larger in terms of length and mass, their heads tended to be proportionally shorter and thinner than non-urban individuals. In ornate tree-lizards, non-urban individuals were larger in every regard other than SVL. Both species saw a decrease in relative limb length in comparison to body length in urban environments. The trends observed in common-side blotched lizards may be explained by higher urban temperatures and novel substrates, while the trends observed in ornate tree lizards are likely due to prey availability, hunting strategy, and novel substrates.

Multi-regional assessments of the trophic niches of different baleen whale species can help elucidate patterns of interspecific and intraspecific variation and mechanisms of coexistence. Challenges in observing feeding dynamics of baleen whales make it difficult to characterize trophic dynamics on a large scale. Stable isotope analysis has been applied to studies of marine trophic ecology as a way to understand individual dietary sources of energy and nutrients as they move through a food web. Generation of Bayesian ellipses within a bi-plot space can allow us to map species trophic niches by means of their isotopic niche which may reveal underlying patterns in resource use within and between species. A detailed review of the variable differences of trophic niche width within and between different species and regions based on isotope analysis of baleen whales has not been previously published. We conducted a meta-analysis examining the isotopic niches from skin isotope data of blue, fin, and humpback whales collected in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans, in which we suggest patterns of niche overlap and partitioning both at the interspecific and intraspecific levels. Furthermore, we highlight variation in baleen whale plasticity to potential changes in environmental and anthropogenic stressors that may drive changes in habitat and resource use, specifically in regard to temporal and spatial variability in prey availability which can have negative consequences for baleen species in a rapidly changing environment.