Among the many biological responses studied in ecotoxicology, energy-based biomarkers such as digestive enzyme activities and energy reserves appear to be useful predictive tools for detecting physiological disturbances in organisms. However, the use of these biological responses as biomarkers could be limited by the effects of confounding factors (biotic and abiotic) and physiological processe...

In landscape ecology, substantial theoretical progress has been made in understanding how critical threshold levels of habitat loss may result in sudden changes in landscape connectivity to animal movement. Empirical evidence for such thresholds in real systems, however, remains scarce. Streambed landscapes provide a strong testing ground for studying critical thresholds because organisms are f...

Aquatic risk assessment can be improved if we are able to quantitatively predict the effects resulting from sequential pulsed exposure to multiple compounds. We evaluate two modeling approaches, both extended to suit multiple compounds, the semi-mechanistic threshold damage model (TDM), and a model based on time-weighted averages (TWA). The TDM predicts that recovery of damage to Gammarus pulex...

Phylogenetically unrelated parasites often increase the chances of their transmission by inducing similar phenotypic changes in their hosts. However, it is not known whether these convergent strategies rely on the same biochemical precursors. In this paper, we explored such aspects by studying two gammarid species (Gammarus insensibilis and Gammarus pulex; Crustacea: Amphipoda: Gammaridae) serv...

Differences in stress tolerance and reproductive traits may drive the competitive hierarchy between nonindigenous and indigenous species and turn the former ones into successful invaders. In the northern Baltic Sea, the non-indigenous Gammarus tigrinus is a recent invader of littoral ecosystems and now occupies comparable ecological niches as the indigenous G. zaddachi. In laboratory experiment...

Manipulative parasites often alter the phenotype of their hosts along multiple dimensions. 'Multidimensionality' in host manipulation could consist in the simultaneous alteration of several physiological pathways independently of one another, or proceed from the disruption of some key physiological parameter, followed by a cascade of effects. We compared multidimensionality in 'host manipulatio...

We have examined the genetic diversity using mitochondrial COI and ND2 sequence data from 306 specimens of the amphi-Atlantic-distributed amphipod Gammarus duebeni. Marine populations from the Atlantic Ocean, the Baltic and North Sea, as well as freshwater populations from Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany were analysed. G. duebeni is a complex of five allopatric lineages. Freshwater populations r...