How rapidly can animal populations in the wild evolve when faced with sudden environmental shifts? Uplift during the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake abruptly created freshwater ponds on multiple islands in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska. In the short time since the earthquake, the phenotypes of resident freshwater threespine stickleback fish on at least three of these islands have cha...

Current knowledge of freshwater gastrotrich fauna from Brazil is underestimated as only two studies are available. The present communication is a taxonomic account of the first-ever survey of freshwater Gastrotricha in Minas Gerais State. Samplings were carried out yielding six species of three Chaetonotidae genera: Aspidiophorus cf. pleustonicus, Ichthydium cf. chaetiferum, Chaetonotus acantho...

Colonisation of novel environments means facing new ecological challenges often resulting in the evolution of striking divergence in phenotypes. However, little is known about behavioural divergence following colonisation, despite the predicted importance of the role of behavioural phenotype-environment associations in adaptive divergence. We studied the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus acu...

Many freshwater shrimps (Decapoda, Caridea) have amphidromous life histories, with extended planktonic larval development in the sea. Larvae either are hatched upstream to drift down to the sea or are carried and released there by females. After development, postlarvae (juveniles) must migrate back up to their adult freshwater habitat. An amphidromous life cycle thus involves long distance migr...

1 Department of Computational Biology, Graduate School of Frontier Science, University of Tokyo, CB04 Kiban-tou 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8561, Japan 2 Computational Biology Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology 3 Graduate School of Information Sciences, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5 Takayama-cho, Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, J...

Deforestation is one of the world’s greatest land-use habitat alterations (Scarsbrook and Halliday, 1999). Specifically, tropical environments, where the rate of deforestation is currently increasing and changing not only the landscape, but the quality of water draining it, are the sites for the greatest freshwater biodiversity loss and system simplification (Boyero and Bailey, 2001). For examp...

The ability of an organisation to recognise the value of new external information, acquire it, assimilate it, transform, and exploit it, namely its absorptive capacity (AC), has been much researched in the context of commercial organisations and even applied to national innovation. This paper considers four key AC-related concepts and their relevance to public sector organisations with mandates...

Published data on nitrate (NO3-) toxicity to freshwater and marine animals are reviewed. New data on nitrate toxicity to the freshwater invertebrates Eulimnogammarus toletanus, Echinogammarus echinosetosus and Hydropsyche exocellata are also presented. The main toxic action of nitrate is due to the conversion of oxygen-carrying pigments to forms that are incapable of carrying oxygen. Nitrate to...

Pigment pattern variation across species or populations offers a tractable framework in which to investigate the evolution of development. Juvenile threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) from marine and freshwater environments exhibit divergent pigment patterns that are associated with ecological differences. Juvenile marine sticklebacks have a silvery appearance, whereas sticklebacks...

Divergent selection and adaptive divergence can increase phenotypic diversification amongst populations and lineages. Yet adaptive divergence between different environments, habitats or niches does not occur in all lineages. For example, the colonization of freshwater environments by ancestral marine species has triggered adaptive radiation and phenotypic diversification in some taxa but not in...