The egg capsules of marine prosobranch gastropods, commonly know as whelks, function as a protective encapsulant for whelk embryos in wave-swept marine environments. The proteinaceous sheets comprising the wall of whelk egg capsules (WEC) exhibit long-range reversible extensibility with a hysteresis of up to 50 per cent, previously suggested to result from reversible changes in the structure of...

Coastal areas of Semarang and Tegal are the fishing ground area traditional fishermen. But with increasing activity in coastal marine it will increase heavy metal contaminants these waters which allegedly contaminating existing biota. Heavy metals pollutants that can accumulate life. This study aims to know concentration lead (Pb) copper (Cu) on catch fishermen Tegal, Central Java. Analysis Pb ...

The endemic Hawaiian Succineidae represent an important component of the exceptionally diverse land snail fauna of the Hawaiian Islands, yet they remain largely unstudied. We employed 663-bp fragments of the cytochrome oxidase I (COI) mitochondrial gene to investigate the evolution and biogeography of 13 Hawaiian succineid land snail species, six succineid species from other Pacific islands and...

Evolutionary processes leading to adaptive radiation regularly occur too fast to be accurately recorded in the fossil record but too slowly to be readily observed in living biota. The study of evolutionary radiations is thereby confronted with an epistemological gap between the timescales and approaches used by neontologists and paleontologists. Here we report on an ongoing radiation of extant ...

The aim of this study was to characterize the pattern of shell occupation by the hermit crab Isocheles sawayai Forest and Saint-Laurent, 1968, from the Caraguatatuba region. The percentage of shell types that were occupied and the morphometric relationships between hermit crabs and occupied shells were analyzed from systematized collections that were conducted monthly from July 2001 to June 200...

Studies on environmental changes provide important insights into modes of speciation, into the (adaptive) reoccupation of ecological niches and into species turnover. Against this background, we here examine the history of the gastropod genus Lanistes in the African Rift Lake Malawi, guided by four general evolutionary scenarios, and compare it with patterns reported from other endemic Malawian...

IVAN BOLOTOV , YULIA BESPALAYA, OLGA AKSENOVA, ANDREY AKSENOV , NIKITA BOLOTOV , MIKHAIL GOFAROV , ALEXANDER KONDAKOV, INGA PALTSER & ILYA VIKHREV 1Institute of Ecological Problems of the North, the Ural Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Severnaya Dvina Emb. 23, 163000 Arkhangelsk, Russian Federation 2Northern (Arctic) Federal University, Severnaya Dvina Emb. 17, 163002 Arkhangelsk, Russia...

The most common classification of modes of speciation begins with the spatial context in which divergence occurs: sympatric, parapatric or allopatric. This classification is unsatisfactory because it divides a continuum into discrete categories, concentrating attention on the extremes, and it subordinates other dimensions on which speciation processes vary, such as the forces driving differenti...

Coral reefs are one of the most diverse systems on the planet; yet, only a small fraction of coral reef species have attracted scientific study. Here, we document strong deleterious effects of an often overlooked species-the vermetid gastropod, Dendropoma maximum-on growth and survival of reef-building corals. Our surveys of vermetids on Moorea (French Polynesia) revealed a negative correlation...