The Clinch River of southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee is arguably the most important river for freshwater mussel conservation in the United States. This featured collection presents investigations of mussel population status and habitat quality in the Clinch River. Analyses of historic waterand sediment-quality data suggest that water column ammonia and water column and sediment ...

The giant bathymodioline mussels from vents have been studied as models to understand the adaptation of organisms to deep-sea chemosynthetic environments. These mussels are closely related to minute mussels associated to organic remains decaying on the deep-sea floor. Whereas biological data accumulate for the giant mussels, the small mussels remain poorly studied. Despite this lack of data for...

de Jager et al. (Reports, 24 June 2011, p. 1551) concluded that mussels Lévy walk. We confronted a larger model set with these data and found that mussels do not Lévy walk: Their movement is best described by a composite Brownian walk. This shows how model selection based on an impoverished set of candidate models can lead to incorrect inferences.

The average concentrations of TBT ngSng were found as 235 in fish, 116 in mussels and 635 in barnacles. All mussels sampled showed values of TBT+DBT, which were below the "tolerable average residue level (TARL)" as currently accepted. Barnacles have high potential as biomonitors for the presence of organotin in the Aegean Sea.

•Some polynoid polychaetes found living commensally in mantle cavities of deep-sea mussels at the seep-sites near the Florida Escarpment, are described as a new species of Branchipolynoe, B. seepensis. They show some differences from the previously described B. symmytilida, commensal with deep-sea mussels in the Galapagos hydrothermal vents. Among the abundant biological communities recently di...

BACKGROUND Effective innate responses against potential pathogens are essential in the living world and possibly contributed to the evolutionary success of invertebrates. Taken together, antimicrobial peptide (AMP) precursors of defensin, mytilin, myticin and mytimycin can represent about 40% of the hemocyte transcriptome in mussels injected with viral-like and bacterial preparations, and uniqu...

The exhalant jet flow of mussels in conjunction with currents and/or other mussels may strongly influence the mussels’ grazing impact. Literature values of mussel exhalant jet velocity vary considerably and the detailed fluid mechanics of the near-mussel flow generated by the exhalant jet has hitherto been uncertain. Computational modelling of this phenomenon depends on knowledge of the velocit...

Mussels are used as sentinel organisms and bioindicators to evaluate the toxic effects of chemical pollutants in marine organisms, especially heavy metals, representing an important tool for biomonitoring environmental pollution in coastal areas. Antioxidant defence enzymes play an important role in cellular antioxidant defence systems and protect from oxidative damage by reactive oxygen specie...