Effective protection against pathogens requires the host to produce a wide range of immune effector proteins. The Sp185/333 gene family, which is expressed by the California purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus in response to bacterial infection, encodes a highly diverse repertoire of anti-pathogen proteins. A subset of these proteins can be isolated by affinity to metal ions based o...

The shortening of telomeres as a causative factor in ageing is a widely discussed hypothesis in ageing research. The study of telomere length and its regenerating enzyme telomerase in the longest-lived non-colonial animal on earth, Arctica islandica, should inform whether the maintenance of telomere length plays a role in reaching the extreme maximum lifespan (MLSP) of >500years in this species...

The present study was carried out to examine possible differential silver distribution among several tissues of three marine invertebrate species: the shrimp Penaeus duorarum, the sea hare Aplysia californica, and the sea urchin Diadema antillarum. Animals were exposed to sub-lethal concentrations of silver (1 or 10 microg/L) in seawater for 48 h. In gill-breathing species (shrimp and sea hare)...

A Cochlodinium polykrikoides red tide occurred in northern coastal waters of the Persian Gulf which killed million tons of fish and benthic animals. This study reports high mortality rate of Solen dactylus (razor clam) populations on the Golshahr coast of Bandar Abbas to show that management and monitoring plans are necessary to prevent future mass mortalities. Specimens of S. dactylus were col...

Our understanding of how air-breathing marine predators cope with environmental variability is limited by our inadequate knowledge of their ecological and physiological parameters. Because of their wide distribution along both coasts of the sub-continent, South American sea lions (Otaria byronia) provide a valuable opportunity to study the behavioral and physiological plasticity of a marine pre...

P-glycoprotein (P-gp), as an ATP-binding cassette transporter, transports a wide variety of substrates varying from small molecules like steroids to large polypeptides across the cell membrane in human and animals, even in aquatic animals. Although P-gp protein has attracted much attention of research, its effect on the toxicity of environmental toxicants such as antifouling biocides is still p...

Strong and predictable environmental variability can reward flexible behaviors among animals. We used long-term records of activity data that cover several lunar cycles to investigate whether behavior at-sea of swallow-tailed gulls Creagrus furcatus, a nocturnal pelagic seabird, varied with lunar phase in the Galápagos Islands. A Bayesian hierarchical model showed that nighttime at-sea activity...

In 1988 and 1989, thousands of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) died in the North Sea from phocine distemper infection. The morphology of thyroid glands from 40 harbor seals found dead on the North Sea coastlines of Schleswig-Holstein, Federal Republic of Germany, during an epizootic of phocine distemper, was compared with the morphology of thyroid glands from five healthy harbor seals collected i...

With the determination of its genome sequence the utility of the sea urchin model system increases. The phylogenetic position of the sea urchin among the deuterostomes allows for informative comparisons to vertebrate research models. A combined whole genome shotgun and bacterial artificial chromosome based strategy yielded a high quality draft genome sequence of 814 Mb. The predicted gene set e...