In a monsoon-affected tropical estuary, oscillations in freshwater discharge during monsoon shifted the phytoplankton blooms from those adapted to low salinities to high salinities and vice versa. Salinity stratification during monsoon (onset and restart after an intermittent break) favored diatom (Skeletonema) bloom in low-saline surface waters. In high-saline, nutrient-rich bottom waters, Fra...

The ubiquitous SAR11 and Prochlorococcus bacteria manage to maintain a sufficient supply of phosphate in phosphate-poor surface waters of the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. Furthermore, it seems that their phosphate uptake may counter-intuitively be lower in more productive tropical waters, as if their cellular demand for phosphate decreases there. By flow sorting (33)P-phosphate-pulsed (32)P...

Classic marine ecological paradigms view kelp forests as inherently temperate-boreal phenomena replaced by coral reefs in tropical waters. These paradigms hinge on the notion that tropical surface waters are too warm and nutrient-depleted to support kelp productivity and survival. We present a synthetic oceanographic and ecophysiological model that accurately identifies all known kelp populatio...

Amphibalanus amphitrite is a common fouling barnacle distributed globally in tropical and subtropical waters. In the present study, the genetic (mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I) and morphological differentiation in A. amphitrite from 25 localities around the world were investigated. The results revealed three clades within A. amphitrite with a genetic divergence of ~ 4% among clades,...

Capsule The breeding foraging and post-breeding dispersal movements of five satellite-tagged Bulwer’s Petrels from the Canary Islands were recorded. Foraging trips lasted 5.6 days in average (n=3), while the mean distance covered was 1261 km, and foraging areas were located over the continental slope and the adjacent pelagic waters, around 1200–2000 m depth and up to 350 km from the colony. Aft...

Tropical seagrasses are nutrient-limited owing to the strong phosphorus fixation capacity of carbonate-rich sediments, yet they form densely vegetated, multispecies meadows in oligotrophic tropical waters. Using a novel combination of high-resolution, two-dimensional chemical imaging of O2, pH, iron, sulfide, calcium, and phosphorus, we found that tropical seagrasses are able to mobilize the es...

The United States Environmental Protection Agency is committed to developing new recreational water quality criteria for coastal waters by 2012 to provide increased protection to swimmers. We review the uncertainties and shortcomings of the current recreational water quality criteria, describe critical research needs for the development of new criteria, as well as recommend a path forward for n...

A rapid increase in greenhouse gas levels is thought to have fueled global warming at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Foraminiferal magnesium/calcium ratios indicate that bottom waters warmed by 4 degrees to 5 degrees C, similar to tropical and subtropical surface ocean waters, implying no amplification of warming in high-latitude regions of deep-water formation under ice-free cond...

Simultaneous measurements of biomass and excretion of macroplankton-micronekton lead to similar results in tropical Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Ratios are thus proposed to roughly estimate regenerated production in oligotrophic tropical waters from biomass data: biomass figures (mg dry wt m-') should be multiplied by 0.32 to estimate the amount of total nitrogen excreted (p,g at m-' day-') and...