The Yorktown Formation records paleoclimate conditions along the mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain during mid-Piacenzian Warm Period (3.264 to 3.025 Ma), a climate interval of Pliocene in some ways analogous near future projections. To gain insight into potential changes, we investigated outcrops and cores southeastern Virginia, refining stratigraphic framework. We analyzed 485 samples for alkenone-ba...

The ostracode genus Bicornucythere (Ostracoda, Crustacea) is abundant in modern-day eutrophic marine bays, and is widely distributed in estuaries and inner bays throughout East Asia, including in China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East. The evolutionary history of Bicornucythere is poorly understood. Here, we report on a new species of Bicornucythere (Bicornucythere concentrica sp. nov.) ...

In order to save natural resources and supply good fishes, it is important to improve fish-farming techniques. The survival rate of fish fry appears to become higher when powders of foraminifer limestone are submerged at the bottom of fish-farming fields, where bacterial biofilms often grow. The observations suggest that forming biofilms can benefit to keep health status of breeding fishes. We ...

Shipboard analysis of the 1,183-m sedimentary section recovered at Site 918 in the Irminger Basin during Ocean Drilling Program Leg 152 revealed material of glacial origin (diamictons, ice-rafted debris (IRD) and dropstones) as deep as 543 m below sea floor (bsf). The sediment containing the deepest dropstone was biostratigraphically dated shipboard as approximately 7 Ma, pushing back the date ...

Planktonic foraminifera are a source of important geochemical, palaeoceanographic, and palaeontological data. However, many aspects of their ecology remain poorly understood, including whether or not gross morphology has an ecological function. Here, we measure the force needed to crush multiple planktonic foraminiferal morphotypes from modern core top and tow samples. We find significant diffe...

The high sequence divergence within the small subunit ribosomal RNA gene (SSU rDNA) of foraminifera makes it difficult to establish the homology of individual nucleotides across taxa. Alignment-based approaches so far relied on time-consuming manual alignments and discarded up to 50% of the sequenced nucleotides prior to phylogenetic inference. Here, we investigate the potential of the multiple...

Laboratory culture experiments were carried out to understand the response of benthic foraminifer Rosalina leei to gradual as well as sudden addition of heavy metal mercury into the media. When mercury was added suddenly, specimens did not show any change in morphology during the initial 40 days. However, later on, out of all the specimens subjected to mercury concentrations up to 150 ng/l, 75%...