Periodical cicadas emerge from below ground every 13 or 17 years in North American forests, with individual broods representing the synchronous movement of trillions of individuals across geographic regions. Due to predator satiation, most individuals escape predation, die, and become deposited as detritus. Some of this emergent biomass falls into woodland aquatic habitats (small streams and wo...

While today’s popular opinion appears to simply discount the importance of detritus as “just plain mud,” scientific evidence indicates that the ancient cultures may have been correct concerning the importance of detritus. Detritus is important on a global scale as well as locally; from its role in the world carbon cycle to supplying part of the nutritional requirements of a marsh periwinkle (St...

E increasingly recognize the need to understand how food webs and landscapes are linked (Polis et al. 2004). Fluxes of organisms, detritus, nutrients, and other materials across landscapes can strongly affect recipient food webs. For example, many studies show that subsidies of plant-available nutrients stimulate primary production and cause changes in species composition of plants as well as o...

Many freshwater ecosystems receive allochthonous resource subsidies from adjacent terrestrial environments. In eastern North American forests, geographic broods of periodical cicadas emerge every 13 to 17 y to breed, and local abundances can sometimes be .300 individuals/m. Most individuals avoid predation, senesce after breeding, and become a resource pulse for forest ecosystems; some cicada c...

Widespread planting of maize throughout the agricultural Midwest may result in detritus entering adjacent stream ecosystems, and 63% of the 2009 US maize crop was genetically modified to express insecticidal Cry proteins derived from Bacillus thuringiensis. Six months after harvest, we conducted a synoptic survey of 217 stream sites in Indiana to determine the extent of maize detritus and prese...

We investigated the foraging behavior of the mud snail, Ilyanassa obsoleta, and its consequences for macrobenthic community structure on mud flats on Long Island, NY, USA. Field sampling demonstrated strong spatial heterogeneity in the population densities of I. obsoleta. We experimentally tested three hypotheses: (i) I. obsoleta are strongly attracted to areas with high levels of detritus; (ii...

An investigation was made on the effects of detritus particle size on leaching rates in organic matter, and the associated environmental changes caused by detritus re-cycling in an oxbow lake (Lagoa do Infernão). Experiments were conducted during the decay of an aquatic macrophyte specie, S. cubensis, which in turn led to the formation of colored compounds. The S. cubensis were collected from t...

This study describes in vivo cell turnover (the balance between cell proliferation and cell loss) in eight marine sponge species from tropical coral reef, mangrove and temperate Mediterranean reef ecosystems. Cell proliferation was determined through the incorporation of 5-bromo-2'-deoxyuridine (BrdU) and measuring the percentage of BrdU-positive cells after 6 h of continuous labeling (10 h for...