Chronic anthropogenic disturbances on coral reefs in the form of overfishing and pollution can shift benthic community composition away from stony corals and toward macroalgae. The use of reefs for recreational snorkeling and diving potentially can lead to similar ecological impacts if not well-managed, but impacts of snorkeling on benthic organisms are not well understood. We quantified variat...

Benthic macro-invertebrates are important components of freshwater ecosystems which are involved in ecological processes such as energy transfer between detritus and consumers and organic matter recycling. The aim of this work was to investigate the variation in organism richness, diversity and density of benthic fauna during the annual cycle in Camargo Lake, a lake marginal to Paranapanema Riv...

The New Zealand cockle Austrovenus stutchburyi is often found stranded on the sediment surface due to infections by echinostome trematodes. High densities of heavily-infected cockles on the sediment surface a¡ect near-seabed hydrodynamics and sedimentation and, in turn, benthic animal community structure and diversity. In a six-month ¢eld experiment on an intertidal sand£at we manipulated the d...

Information on long-term temporal variability of and trends in benthic community-structure variables, such as biomass, is needed to estimate the range of normal variability in comparison with the effects of environmental change or disturbance. Fishery resource distribution and population growth will be influenced by such variability. This study examines benthic macrofaunal biomass and related d...

We studied the ecological effects of mining-derived metals on riffle-dwelling benthic fishes at 16 sites in the Viburnum Trend lead-zinc mining district of southeast Missouri. Fish community attributes were compared to watershed features and to physical and chemical variables including metal concentrations in sediment pore water and fish. Ozark sculpin (Cottus hypselurus), rainbow darter (Etheo...

The effects of pollution (nutrient enrichment). and the presence of macrovegetation on the species diversity and density of large benthic fauna in the Manukau Harbour, Auckland, were studied by sampling eight soft shore, intertidal habitats. Pollution was found to reduce faunal density but to have only a slight effect on species diversity. The presence of dense meadows of the intertidal seaweed...

1. Non-indigenous ecosystem engineers can substantially affect native biodiversity by transforming the physical structure of habitats. In the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River system, introduced dreissenid mussels (Dreissena polymorpha and D. bugensis) and the native benthic macroalga Cladophora act as ecosystem engineers by increasing substratum complexity and providing interstitial habitat for b...

Benthic algae in the littoral region of Lake Tanganyika serve as chemical modulators transforming inorganic chemicals into organic forms, represent habitats for other organisms, provide food for snails and cichlid fish and are important in stabilizing the substrata of community existence. These algae represent an evolutionary diverse group of photoautotrophic organisms that contain chlorophyll ...

An increasing number of studies use next generation sequencing (NGS) to analyze complex communities, but is the method sensitive enough when it comes to identification and quantification of species? We compared NGS with morphology-based identification methods in an analysis of microalgal (periphyton) communities. We conducted a mesocosm experiment in which we allowed two benthic grazer species ...