This paper summarizes the overall benefits supplied by Mediterranean marine biodiversity to human health and highlights the anthropogenic and environmental causes that are threatening these benefits. First, the Mediterranean Sea is a valuable source of seafood, which is an important component of the so-called "Mediterranean diet". This type of diet has several health benefits, including cardio ...

Satellite data show a steady increase, in the last decades, of the surface temperature (upper few millimetres of the water surface) of the Mediterranean Sea. Reports of mass mortalities of benthic marine invertebrates increased in the same period. Some local studies interpreted the two phenomena in a cause-effect fashion. However, a basin-wide picture of temperature changes combined with a syst...

[1] A common practice in sea level research is to analyze separately the variability of the steric and mass components of sea level. However, there are conceptual and practical issues that have sometimes been misinterpreted, leading to erroneous and contradictory conclusions on regional sea level variability. The crucial point to be noted is that the steric component does not account for volume...

[1] We compare the results of three baroclinic models with the aim of evaluating their skills in reproducing Mediterranean long-term sea level variability. The models are an ocean-ice coupled forced global model (ORCA), a regional forced ocean model (OM8) and a regional coupled atmosphere-ocean model (MITgcm). Model results are compared for the period 1961–2000 against hydrographic observations...

Global increase in sea temperatures has been suggested to facilitate the incoming and spread of tropical invaders. The increasing success of these species may be related to their higher physiological performance compared with indigenous ones. Here, we determined the effect of temperature on the aerobic metabolic scope (MS) of two herbivorous fish species that occupy a similar ecological niche i...

We investigated seasonal shifts in diet and distribution of fin whales Bala en optera physalus occurring in the western Mediterranean Sea. For this purpose, we combined carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios (δ13C, δ15N) along 10 baleen plates collected from stranded fin whales between 1975 and 2002 with satellite tag deployments on 11 fin whales during summer 2003. Baleen plate stable isoto...

The status of the Mediterranean and Black Sea fisheries was evaluated for the period 1970-2010 on a subarea basis, using various indicators including the temporal variability of total landings, the number of recorded stocks, the mean trophic level of the catch, the fishing-in-balance index and the catch-based method of stock classification. All indicators confirmed that the fisheries resources ...

Citation: Tsiola A, Tsagaraki TM, Giannakourou A, Nikolioudakis N, Yücel N, Herut B and Pitta P (2017) Corrigendum: Bacterial Growth and Mortality after Deposition of Saharan Dust and Mixed Aerosols in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea: A Mesocosm Experiment. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:57. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00057 Corrigendum: Bacterial Growth and Mortality after Deposition of Saharan Dust and Mixed A...

The geographical distribution of the Rissoidae in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea was compiled and is up-to-date until July 2011. All species were classified according to their mode of larval development (planktotrophic and nonplanktotrophic), and bathymetrical zonation (shallow species--those living between the intertidal and 50 m depth, and deep species--those usually living below 50...

The Mediterranean Sea is one of the most oligotrophic marine areas on earth where nitrogen fixation has formally believed to play an important role in carbon and nitrogen fluxes. Although this view is under debate, the diazotrophs responsible for this activity have still not been investigated in the open sea. In this study, we characterised the surface distribution and species richness of unice...