Episodic blooms of voracious gelatinous zooplankton, such as the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, affect pools of inorganic nutrients and dissolved organic carbon by intensive grazing activities and mucus release. This will potentially influence bacterioplankton activity and community composition, at least at local scales; however, available studies on this are scarce. In the present study we exam...

The capability of animals to emit light, called bioluminescence, is considered to be a major factor in ecological interactions. Because it occurs across diverse taxa, measurements of bioluminescence can be powerful to detect and quantify organisms in the ocean. In this study, 17 years of video observations were recorded by remotely operated vehicles during surveys off the California Coast, from...

In the past, molecular clocks have been used to estimate divergence times among animal phyla, but those time estimates have varied widely (1200-670 million years ago, Ma). In order to obtain time estimates that are more robust, we have analysed a larger number of genes for divergences among three well-represented animal phyla, and among plants, animals and fungi. The time estimate for the chord...

We have used the giant ciliary comb plates of ctenophores to record electrical activity directly from cilia. A compound action potential was recorded extracellularly over most of the length of the comb plate cilia in response to electrical stimulation of the ectodermal nerve net. The ciliary action potential was correlated with intracellularly recorded action potentials, selectively blocked by ...

The non-bilaterian animals comprise organisms in the phyla Porifera, Cnidaria, Ctenophora and Placozoa. These early-diverging phyla are pivotal to understanding the evolution of bilaterian animals. After the exponential increase in research in evolutionary development (evo-devo) in the last two decades, these organisms are again in the spotlight of evolutionary biology. In this work, I briefly ...

Ctenophores are poorly known in the tropical eastern Pacific, including the southern coast of Mexico. Previous records of ctenophores along the Pacific coast have been provided mainly from northern waters. For the coast of Oaxaca state, their occurrence has only been mentioned before at phylum level. In this paper, we provide the first three records of ctenophores for the Oaxacan coast, which r...

This recent meeting covered non-bilaterian (e.g., cnidarians, ctenophores, and sponges) animals broadly, but with emphasis in four areas: 1) New genomic resources and tools for functional studies, 2) advances in developmental and regeneration studies, 3) the evolution and function of nervous systems, 4) symbiosis and the holobiome.

Ctenophores are traditionally regarded as "lower" metazoans, sharing with cnidarians a diploblastic grade of organization. Unlike cnidarians, where skeletonization (biomineralization and sclerotization) evolved repeatedly among ecologically important taxa (for example, scleractinians and octocorals), living ctenophores are characteristically soft-bodied animals. We report six sclerotized and ar...

The general aim of this paper is to present a possible multidisciplinary approach to the problem of connectivity among marine protected areas (MPAs) describing some of the mechanisms and vectors that control the dispersal of propagules among spatially distributed marine communities of MPAs in the Southern Adriatic Sea. A joint approach is described that focuses on (a) measurements of surface wa...