During the winter and summer of 2019, eight study sites in eastern Libya were used to establish meiofauna diversity Southern Mediterranean Sea's near-shore sandy bottom surf region. The physicochemical characteristics surface water at mostly similar. Seventeen taxa floatable (extracted from sediment samples by floatation) identified, sixteen during ten summer: By number individuals per taxon, N...

UNLABELLED PREMISE OF THE STUDY Nuclear microsatellite primers were developed for the weedy herb Anacyclus clavatus to study the genetic structure of hybrid zones with closely related taxa in the western Mediterranean Basin, where different floral phenotypes are present. • METHODS AND RESULTS We obtained two microsatellite libraries using next-generation sequencing and Sanger sequencing of...

Fifteen fish species, totalling 149 specimens, were cytochrome c oxidase I sequenced— barcoded—from Northern (Atlantic and Mediterranean) and Southern (Australasian) Hemisphere waters. Thirteen species showed no significant evidence of spatial genetic differentiation for this gene, although small sample sizes reduced statistical power. For marine fish, barcodes collected in one part of a specie...

Dating fossil hominids and reconstructing their environments is critically important for understanding human evolution. Here we date the potentially oldest hominin, Graecopithecus freybergi from Europe and constrain the environmental conditions under which it thrived. For the Graecopithecus-bearing Pikermi Formation of Attica/Greece, a saline aeolian dust deposit of North African (Sahara) prove...

Microsatellite alleles were used to delimit the genetic boundaries and divergence of the two relictual endemic Pyrenean taxa Borde rea chouardii and B. pyrenaica (Dioscoreaceae ), and to infer the different life histories followed by each species. Our study was conducted on the same populations previously analyzed with allozymes and RAPD markers. The three studied data sets were congruent in th...

Jellyfishes represent a group of species that play an important role in oceans, particularly as a food source for different taxa and as a predator of fish larvae and planktonic prey. The massive introduction of artificial sound sources in the oceans has become a concern to science and society. While we are only beginning to understand that non-hearing specialists like cephalopods can be affecte...

An aeropalynological study was carried out in the atmosphere of Estepona, a very popular tourist resort situated in the "Costa del Sol", (southern Spain) based on the data obtained during a three year air-monitoring programme (March 1995 to March 1998) using a volumetric pollen trap. The 34 taxa that reached a 10-day mean air pollen concentration equal to or greater than 1 grain of pollen/m(3) ...

Among the different species of Crocus, only C. sativus has been extensively studied for the composition and the biological properties of its styles, since these constitute the well-known spice saffron, which is widely used in the Mediterranean, Indian and Chinese diet. With high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and UV/vis spectroscopy, the presence of hydrophilic carotenoids in the styl...

The striped venus clams Chamelea gallina and C. striatula are commercially important bivalves inhabiting European and North African coastal waters. The taxonomic status of these taxa has been the subject of debate for decades. In order to elucidate this issue, we generated 5S and 28S ribosomal RNA and H3 histone gene probes and mapped them by fluorescent in situ hybridization to the chromosomes...