The ball‐and‐cup diagram for conceptualizing ecosystem stability, resistance, and resilience is often presented as a ball rolling around within and between two or more cups. This analogy has a long history in ecology and has been used to illustrate ecosystem changes over time where the magnitude of changes required to push the ball from one cup to another represents a regime shift to an alternative state. Another approach for visualizing ecosystem stability, resistance, and resilience involves ordinations of repeated measures of community data or environmental variables and tracking trajectories over time in ordination space. Interestingly, the two approaches have not been linked in a meaningful way. Here, we provide a conceptual link between trajectories of ecological change in ordination space to the ball‐and‐cup analogy and show how distance‐based measures calculated from ordination scores can be used to quantitatively classify and evaluate the relative stability and resilience of ecological systems.

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Over 65% of patients had endometriosis-related surgical procedures, including hysterectomy, within 1 year of being diagnosed with endometriosis. The cost of surgical procedures related to endometriosis places a significant financial burden on the healthcare system.

Within the southern United States, game and fish agencies have introduced nonnative Florida bass (FB), Micropterus floridanus (Lesueur 1822), as an alternative to native northern largemouth bass (NLMB), M. salmoides (Lacèpéde 1802), for decades because of suspected maximum size differences between the 2 species. The goal of this study was to determine if bass with differing levels of FB alleles demonstrated differential size structure within 6 southern Arkansas reservoirs stocked with FB. Despite millions of FB being introduced into these reservoirs over the last decade, FB made up <2% of the sampled bass for 5 of 6 reservoirs. Most sampled populations consisted primarily of one species and hybrids genetically similar to that species. In Lake Monticello, where FB numbers were relatively high, FB had significantly greater mean lengths and weights than FB × NLMB hybrids. By contrast, other reservoir bass populations showed no significant pairwise differences among species or their hybrids. From a fisheries management perspective, introducing FB outside its native range remains a controversial issue, and long-term controlled studies are needed in Arkansas to better resolve size differences observed among FB, NLMB, and their hybrids.