Whale barnacles and Neogene cetacean migration routes

Fossil whale barnacles from the lower Pleistocene of Sicily shed light on the coeval Mediterranean cetacean fauna

We report on three shells of whale barnacle (Cirripedia: Coronulidae) collected from Pleistocene shallow-marine deposits exposed at Cinisi (northwestern Sicily, southern Italy). These specimens are identified as belonging to the extinct species Coronula bifida BRONN, 1831. Calcareous nannoplankton analysis of the sediment hosting the coronulid remains places the time of deposition between 1.93 ...

Miocene whale-fall from California demonstrates that cetacean size did not determine the evolution of modern whale-fall communities.

Whale-fall communities support a deep-sea invertebrate assemblage that subsists entirely on the decaying carcasses of large cetaceans. The oldest whale-falls are Late Eocene in age, but these early whale-falls differ in faunal content and host cetacean size from Neogene and Recent whale-falls. Vesicomyid bivalves, for example, are major components of the sulphophilic stage in Miocene and Recent...

Individuality in bird migration: routes and timing.

The exploration of animal migration has entered a new era with individual-based tracking during multiple years. Here, we investigated repeated migratory journeys of a long-distance migrating bird, the marsh harrier Circus aeruginosus, in order to analyse the variation within and between individuals with respect to routes and timing. We found that there was a stronger individual repeatability in...

Summary Information on Whale Shark and Cetacean Interactions in the Tropical Wcpfc Purse Seine Fishery

Cetacean mitochondrial DNA control region: sequences of all extant baleen whales and two sperm whale species.

The sequence of the mitochondrial control region was determined in all 10 extant species commonly assigned to the suborder Mysticeti (baleen or whalebone whales) and to two odontocete (toothed whale) species (the sperm and the pygmy sperm whale). In the mysticetes, both the length and the sequence of the control region were very similar, with differences occurring primarily in the first approxi...