Maintaining food production while sustaining productive ecosystems is among the central challenges of our time, yet, it has been for millennia. Ancient clam gardens, intertidal rock-walled terraces constructed by humans during the late Holocene, are thought to have improved the growing conditions for clams. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the beach slope, intertidal height, and biomass a...

Evidence is accumulating rapidly showing that temperature and other climatic variables are driving many ecological processes. At the same time, recent research has highlighted the role of parasitism in the dynamics of animal populations and the structure of animal communities. Here, the likely interactions between climate change and parasitism are discussed in the context of intertidal ecosyste...

Caligus mortis Kensley, 1970 was originally described from females collected from intertidal pools along the coast of Namibia. During surveys at Jeffreys Bay and De Hoop Nature Reserve in South Africa, both females and males of C. mortis were collected from intertidal pool fish hosts. Based on this material a full description of the male is given, and a comparison with the female reveals the se...

SYNOPSIS. The goal of my research program is to employ biochemical and molecular techniques to gain ecological insight into the role of temperature in setting species’ distribution patterns in the marine environment. Our central focus is the study of the environmental regulation of gene expression, where we are particularly interested in a set of inducible molecular chaperones, the heat-shock p...