Island ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to exotic species. Here we show how an introduced prey has led to the wholesale restructuring of an island food web, including the near extinction of an endemic carnivore. Introduced pigs, by providing abundant food, enabled golden eagles to colonize the California Channel Islands. Eagles preyed heavily on the island fox, whose resulting decline tow...

The microscopic selection mechanisms of single-layer island shapes in Pt(111) homoepitaxy with or without minute amounts of CO adsorbate have been investigated theoretically. For clean growth, only triangular islands of a fixed orientation are obtained within a wide range of growth temperatures, with the orientation uniquely determined by a disparity in the rates of atom supply to an island cor...

The dynamic scaling of the island-size distribution in submonolayer epitaxial growth and its dependence on the critical island size i is studied using a realistic model of epitaxial growth for i ­ 0, 1, 2, and 3. An analytic expression for the scaled island-size distribution as a function of i is also proposed. Our results agree well with experiments on FeyFe(100) deposition and on FeyCu(100) d...

Three new cavernicolous species of Hyleoglomeris are described from Greece: Hyleoglomerissubreducta sp.n., from Chios Island, Hyleoglomeristranslucida sp.n., from Rhodes Island, and Hyleoglomerisinsularis sp.n., from Kalymnos Island, all in the Aegean Sea.

Island endemics are expected to have low effective population sizes (Ne), first because some may experience population bottlenecks when they are founded, and second because they have restricted ranges. Therefore, we expect island species to have reduced genetic diversity, inefficient selection, and reduced adaptive potential compared with their mainland counterparts. We used both polymorphism a...

Sixteen species of bats are reported from Margarita Island, Nueva Esparta, Venezuela. These include two species of emballonurids, one noctilionid, two mormoopids, nine phyllostomatids, one vespertilionid, and one molossid. Accounts including natural history and taxonomic comments are given for each species. The chiropteran fauna of Margarita Island is compared with the bat faunas of the adjacen...

Tristan da Cunha is the world’s remotest inhabited island, with a population of around 270 people. Ship rats (Rattus rattus) and house mice (Mus musculus) are present on the main island of Tristan and house mice are present on Gough Island, also part of the UK Overseas Territory of Tristan da Cunha. The impacts of invasive rodents on both islands have been well documented and detailed plans to ...

CpG-island margins and non-island-CpG sites round the transcription start sites of CpG-island-positive and -negative genes are methylated to various degrees in a tissue-specific manner. These methylation-variable CpG sites were analyzed to delineate a relationship between the methylation and transcription of the tissue-specific genes. The level of tissue-specific transcription was estimated by ...

Genetic diversity generally underpins population resilience and persistence. Reductions in population size and absence of gene flow can lead to reductions in genetic diversity, reproductive fitness, and a limited ability to adapt to environmental change increasing the risk of extinction. Island populations are typically small and isolated, and as a result, inbreeding and reduced genetic diversi...

MacArthur and Wilson's theory of island biogeography predicts that island species richness should increase with island area. This prediction generally holds among large islands, but among small islands species richness often varies independently of island area, producing the so-called 'small-island effect' and an overall biphasic species-area relationship (SAR). Here, we develop a unified theor...