The survival of culturable fecal coliforms, fecal streptococci, and Clostridium perfringens spores in freshwater and marine sediments from sites near sewage outfalls was studied. In laboratory studies, the inhibition of protozoan predators with cycloheximide allowed the fecal coliforms to grow in the sediment whereas the presence of predators resulted in a net die-off. C. perfringens spores did...

One of the major goals of community ecology is to understand how interactions among the resident organisms affect their distribution and abundance. For terrestrial and rocky intertidal communities competition and predation clearly can play pivotal roles in community organization (28, 47, 84). The importance of biological processes in organizing marine soft-sediment communities is not as well un...

An international workshop on marine integrated contaminant monitoring (ICON) was organised to test a framework on integrated environmental assessment and simultaneously assess the status of selected European marine areas. Biota and sediment were sampled in selected estuarine, inshore and offshore locations encompassing marine habitats from Iceland to the Spanish Mediterranean. The outcome of th...

Drugs from the sea? Darwin may not have considered this concept when he was thinking about mechanisms that drove diversification of life on earth. In recognition of his 200th year, and celebration of the publication in 1859 of his "On the origin of species", we review the global status of marine biodiscovery in medicinal fields, with a focus on the South Pacific. Furthermore, in the Darwinian s...

On June 2013 a workshop at the University of Siena (Italy) was organized to review current knowledge and to clarify what is known, and what remains to be investigated, concerning plastic litter in the sea. The content of the workshop was designed to contribute further to the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) following an inaugural workshop in 2012. Here we report a number of s...

Heavy metals that enter marine environment and remain in the water as well as the sediments are accumulated by aquatic organisms, thus becoming highly good indicators to monitor metal accumulation in the long run. Metals are potentially harmful to humans and most organisms at varied levels of exposure and absorption. Northern East Mediterranean Sea is a crucial region as it is an area, shared b...

The wide chemical and biological diver extraordinary source of high added value served in the marine environment makes the ocean an nds (HAVC) which can be employed in many applications. d proteins from marine sources have unique features and, found in parts of marine organisms that are commonly of the chief methodo

Mercury is a widespread contaminant in marine food webs, and identifying uptake pathways of mercury species, CH3Hg(+) and Hg(2+), into low trophic level organisms is important to understanding its entry into marine food webs. Enriched stable isotope tracers were used to study benthic vs. pelagic pathways of CH3Hg(+) and Hg(2+) uptake via food to the infaunal estuarine amphipod, Leptocheirus plu...

Marine organisms modify the distribution of radioisotopes in the oceanic ecosystem. Various vital processes of plants and animals concentrate elements. The distributions of the biota are often independent of their watery environment; they may actively migrate vertically or horizontally or may remain in place while the water moves past them. In the case of plankton, the concentrating organisms p...