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About 4 × 105 eggs in more than 5000 marine turtle nests are deposited every year on a 3.6 km long beach in French Guiana (South America). The dry biomass of eggs is estimated to be 5 × 103 kg, yet only 25% of th...
Assessing the suitability of a habitat prior to the release of animals is vital. Proper assessment of the flora will allow reintroduction programmes to determine whether the area will be capable of supporting ...
Honey bees, Apis mellifera, face many parasites and pathogens and consequently rely on a diverse set of individual and group-level defenses to prevent disease. One route by which honey bees and other insects migh...
Rare long distance dispersal events impact the demography and the genetic structure of populations. When dispersal is modelled via a dispersal kernel, one possible characterisation of long-distance dispersal i...
Harbour porpoises Phocoena phocoena from the southern North Sea are known to display high levels of Zn and Hg in their tissues linked to their nutritional status (emaciation). The question arises regarding a pote...
Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) is the method of choice to study interfacial biofilms and acquires time-resolved three-dimensional data of the biofilm structure. CLSM can be used in a multi-channel m...
Autochthony in forest tree stands is characterized by a number of criteria, among which the range over which stands act as a population has been suggested to play a central role. Therefore, measures are needed...
Amphibians are sensitive indicators of environmental conditions and show measurable responses, such as changes in phenology, abundance and range limits to local changes in precipitation and temperature regimes...
The time varying flows of biomass and energy in tsetse (Glossina) can be examined through the construction of a dynamic mass-energy budget specific to these flies but such a budget depends on efficiencies of meta...
Despite the two-fold cost of sex, most of the higher animals reproduce sexually. The advantage of sex has been suggested to be its ability, through recombination, to generate greater genetic diversity than ase...
The investigation was conducted in a savanna area covered by what was considered an undesirably dense stand of Colophospermum mopane trees, mainly because such a dense stand of trees often results in the suppress...
For parasites with a predator-prey life cycle, the completion of the life cycle often depends on consumption of parasitized prey by the predator. In the case of such parasite species the predator and the paras...
Most self-pollinating plants are annuals. According to the 'time-limitation' hypothesis, this association between selfing and the annual life cycle has evolved as a consequence of strong r-selection, involving...
The Teak defoliator (Hyblaea puera) is a pest moth of teak woodlands in India and other tropical regions (e.g. Thailand) and is of major economic significance. This pest is of major concern as it is involved in c...
In Southern Africa savannas climate change has been proposed to alter rainfall, the most important environmental driver for woody plants. Woody plants are a major component of savanna vegetation determining ra...
Rodents typically avoid illuminated and open areas, favoring dark or sheltered environments for activity. While previous studies focused on the effect of these environmental attributes on the level of activity...
In Denmark and many other European countries, harvest records suggest a marked decline in European brown hare numbers, a decline often attributed to the agricultural practice. In the present study, we analyse ...
The plastic response of fine roots to a changing environment is suggested to affect the growth and form of a plant. Here we show that the plasticity of fine root growth may increase plant productivity based on...
Microarray technology allows researchers to simultaneously monitor changes in the expression ratios (ERs) of hundreds of genes and has thereby revolutionized most of biology. Although this technique has the po...
The native annual tobacco, Nicotiana attenuata, is found primarily in large ephemeral populations (typically for less than 3 growing seasons) after fires in sagebrush and pinyon-juniper ecosystems and in small pe...
The commonly invoked cost-benefit paradigm, central to most of functional biology, explains why one phenotype cannot be optimally fit in all environments; yet it is rarely tested. Trypsin proteinase inhibitors...
Community recovery following primary habitat alteration can provide tests for various hypotheses in ecology and conservation biology. Prominent among these are questions related to the manner and rate of commu...
Mixed evergreen forests form the smallest, most widely distributed and fragmented biome in southern Africa. Within South Africa, 44% of this vegetation type has been transformed. Afromontane forest only covers...
Explanations for patterns observed in the structure of local assemblages are frequently sought with reference to interactions between species, and between species and their local environment. However, analyses...
Lysozymes, enzymes mostly associated with defence against bacterial infections, are mureinolytic. Ruminants have evolved a gastric c type lysozyme as a digestive enzyme, and profit from digestion of foregut ba...
Extensive work has been done to identify and explain multi-year cycles in animal populations. Several attempts have been made to relate these to climatic cycles. We use advanced time series analysis methods to...
Variation in mate choice behaviour among females within a population may influence the strength and form of sexual selection, yet the basis for any such variation is still poorly understood. Condition-dependen...
Methods involving the analysis of nucleic acids have become widespread in the fields of traditional biology and ecology, however the storage and transport of samples collected in the field to the laboratory in...
While fire has been used in some instances to control the increase of woody plants, it has also been reported that fire may cause an increase in certain fire-tolerant Acacia tree species. This study investigated ...
Research on the ecological consequences of global climate change has elicited a growing interest in the use of time series analysis to investigate population dynamics in a changing climate. Here, we compare li...
In many species of birds, pair bonded males and females precisely co-ordinate their vocalisations to form duets. Duetting behaviour, although still somewhat of an enigma, is thought to function primarily in te...
Differences among species and among years in reproductive seasonality (the tendency for clusters of events to fall at approximately the same point in each year) and synchrony (amount of clustering of events wi...
Previous studies have revealed that the response of prey species to predatory risk comprised either freezing (when the prey remained immobile), or fleeing (when it ran frantically in order to remove itself fro...
Direct observations of underwater behaviour of free-living marine mammals are rare. This is particularly true for large and potentially dangerous species such as the walrus (Odobenus rosmarus). Walruses are highl...
The specific associations between plant roots and the soil microbial community are key to understanding nutrient cycling in grasslands, but grass roots can be difficult to identify using morphology alone. A mo...
The rapid expansion in the availability of genome and DNA sequence information has opened up new possibilities for the development of methods for detecting free-living protozoa in environmental samples. The pr...
Although Nicotiana attenuata is entirely self-compatible, chemical and other floral traits suggest selection for the maintenance of advertisement for moth pollinators.
Interspecific hybridisation is common between many plant species and causes rapid changes in a variety of plant characters. This may pose problems for herbivores because changes in recognition characters may b...
Recent studies of anadromous salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) on the Pacific Coast of North America indicate an important and previously unrecognized role of salmonid nutrients to terrestrial biota. However, the extent...
During their movements in the wild, wood mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) distribute small objects, such as leaves or twigs, which are often visually conspicuous. Our experiments demonstrate that these marks serve as p...
There has been an error in the publication of this paper [1]; the title should read: 'Organochlorine pollutants in California sea lions revisited'.
The original article was published in BMC Ecology 2002 2:11
The possibility for commercial mining of deep-sea manganese nodules is currently under exploration in the abyssal Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone. Nematodes have potential for biomonitoring of the impact of c...
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are ubiquitous environmental contaminants that have been banned in most countries, but considerable amounts continue to cycle the ecos...
The effect of rainfall patterns on soil surface CO2 efflux, soil moisture, soil temperature and plant growth was investigated in a grassland ecosystem of northern Ontario, Canada, where climatic change is predict...
In spite of very low nutrient concentrations in its vicinity – both column and pore waters-, the Posidonia oceanica of the Revellata Bay displays high biomass and productivity. We measured the nutrient fluxes fro...
Stomata respond to vapour pressure deficit (D) – when D increases, stomata begin to close. Closure is the result of a decline in guard cell turgor, but the link between D and turgor is poorly understood. We de...
Because moisture and temperature influence the growth of fungi, characterizing weather conditions favorable for fungi may be used to predict the abundance and richness of fungi in habitats with different clima...
Importance of parasites in ecological and evolutionary interactions is being increasingly recognized. However, ecological data on parasites of important host species is still scanty. We analyze the patterns se...
Glucosinolate breakdown products are volatile, therefore good candidates for insect fumigants. However, although they are insecticidal, the mode of action of such natural products is not clear. We studied the ...
Bi-directional flow of nutrients between marine and terrestrial ecosystems can provide essential resources that structure communities in transitional habitats. On the Pacific coast of North America, anadromous...
