A 125-mile reach of the South River, Virginia, was contaminated with mercury during the first half of the 20th century. As increased concentrations of mercury have persisted, researchers have carefully studied its distribution in the river biota and estimated associated risks. The present study evaluated the influence of mercury on feeding rate and uptake by the amphipod Hyalella azteca. The te...

the food and feeding habit of beardless barb, cyclocheilichthys apogon (valenciennes, 1842), from family cyprinidae was investigated by stomach content analyses of 374 collected fish in two consecutive reservoirs; temengor and bersia reservoirs which are separated by temengor dam. the main aim of this study was to compare the stomach contents of c. apogon between these two reservoirs in wet and...

Amphipods are often dominant components of benthic marine communities and may exhibit taxon-specific differences in feeding behavior. As a result, variation in the composition of amphipod communities is an important metric for the interpretation of trophic dynamics in benthic marine ecosystems. Though previous studies of amphipod diets indicate functional diversity among taxa, few studies have ...

There is a significant relationship between the intestine length (Y) and total body length (X) for 11 species of freshwater fish (Y = 0.08X1.42). Sufficient variation exists about this relationship to indicate important differences among the species' diets. The diets for each species, ranked on a Trophic Index scale determined from literature data, are negatively rank order correlated with the ...

Few studies have examined heat vulnerability on a sub-metropolitan area level. This paper presents an analysis of heat vulnerability across Ohio (USA) on a county level. Each county is classified as ‘urban’, ‘suburban’, or ‘rural’. Four different criteria defining what is meteorologically ‘oppressive’ are evaluated individually. Each of these criteria is associated with an increase in mortality...

BACKGROUND While the "widowhood effect" is well known, there is substantial heterogeneity in the magnitude of effects reported in different studies. We conducted a meta-analysis of widowhood and mortality, focusing on longitudinal studies with follow-up from the time of bereavement. METHODS AND FINDINGS A random-effects meta-analysis was conducted to calculate the overall relative risk (RR) f...

Herbivores often specialize on particular hosts that provide both food and shelter from natural enemies. It is thus often unclear whether a plant’s value as a food or its value as a safe shelter has played a larger role in selecting for specialization. Decorator crabs offer a novel opportunity to investigate the relative effects of diet vs. natural enemies in selecting for specialization becaus...

Two forage species alfalfa (Medicago sativa), and sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia Scop.), at two consecutive growing season (spring and summer), were studied for their chemical composition and in vitro gas production characteristics. Data on cumulative gas production (mL gas/g DM) were fitted to the non-sigmoidal model, and for evaluation of model, the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) ...