Production, Predation and Food Niche Segregation in a Marine Shallow Soft-Bottom Community

Competition and Predation in Marine Soft-sediment Communities

One of the major goals of community ecology is to understand how interactions among the resident organisms affect their distribution and abundance. For terrestrial and rocky intertidal communities competition and predation clearly can play pivotal roles in community organization (28, 47, 84). The importance of biological processes in organizing marine soft-sediment communities is not as well un...

Gradient effects on structuring of soft-bottom benthic infauna: Macoma balthica and predation, recruitment, and food availability

Soft bottom community structure and diversity in Kongsfjorden (Svalbard)

Marine diversity is currently one of the most studied topics in ecology especially under the frame of global and regional environmental changes. In the marine realm biodiversity declines from the tropics to the Arctic (Thorson 1957, Brattegard & Holthe 1997, Roy et al. 1996, 1998, Gray 2001). Habitat and environmental heterogeneity generally favour biodiversity; additionally, intermediate physi...

Sexual Niche Segregation and Gender-Specific Individual Specialisation in a Highly Dimorphic Marine Mammal

While sexual segregation is expected in highly dimorphic species, the local environment is a major factor driving the degree of resource partitioning within a population. Sexual and individual niche segregation was investigated in the Australian fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus doriferus), which is a benthic foraging species restricted to the shallow continental shelf region of south-eastern Au...

Assessing benthic health of hard substratum macrobenthic community using soft bottom indicators and their relationship with environmental condition

This study aimed to assess ecological quality status of hard substratum macroinvertebrates communities of the Caspian Sea with three ecological indices and their relation with environmental factors. For this purpose benthic communities of the Caspian Sea basin were studied seasonally during 2014 in 8 sampling sites. Temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, nitrate, nitrite, silicate and pho...