As the earth faces a warming climate, the rock record reminds us that comparable climatic scenarios have occurred before. In the Late Cretaceous, Arctic marine organisms were not subject to frigid temperatures but still contended with seasonal extremes in photoperiod. Here, we describe an unusual fossil assemblage from Devon Island, Arctic Canada, that offers a snapshot of a ca 75 Myr ago marin...

Most organisms have complex life cycles, and in marine taxa, larval life-history stages tend to be more sensitive to environmental stress than adult (reproductive) life-history stages. While there are several models of stage-specific adaptation across the life history, the extent to which differential sensitivity to environmental stress (defined here as reductions in absolute fitness across the...

The degree to which population fluctuations arise from variable adult survival relative to variable recruitment has been debated widely for marine organisms. Disentangling these effects remains challenging because data generally are not sufficient to evaluate if and how adult survival rates are regulated by stochasticity and/or population density. Using unique time series for a largely unexploi...

The majority (>99%) of microorganisms from the environment resist cultivation in the laboratory. Ribosomal RNA analysis suggests that uncultivated organisms are found in nearly every prokaryotic group, and several divisions have no known cultivable representatives. We designed a diffusion chamber that allowed the growth of previously uncultivated microorganisms in a simulated natural environmen...

The presence of large densities of the piston-pumping polychaete Lanice conchilega can have important consequences for the functioning of marine sediments. It is considered both an allogenic and an autogenic ecosystem engineer, affecting spatial and temporal biogeochemical gradients (oxygen concentrations, oxygen penetration depth and nutrient concentrations) and physical properties (grain size...

Over the past decade, fluorescent proteins (FPs) have become ubiquitous tools in biological research. Yet, little is known about the natural function or evolution of this superfamily of proteins that originate from marine organisms. Using molecular phylogenetic analyses of 102 naturally occurring cyan fluorescent proteins, green fluorescent proteins, red fluorescent proteins, as well as the non...

To assess distributional shifts of species in response to recent warming, historical distribution records are the most requisite information. The surface seawater temperature (SST) of Kochi Prefecture, southwestern Japan on the western North Pacific, has significantly risen, being warmed by the Kuroshio Current. Past distributional records of subtidal canopy-forming seaweeds (Laminariales and F...

Article history: Received on: 19/12/2014 Revised on: 21/01/2015 Accepted on: 14/02/2015 Available online: 28/03/2015 Collagen is the sole most profuse protein in the animal kingdom. It has been subjected to various studies from time immemorial. Its applications are numerous and have been extracted from various sources such as land animals (mainly bovine and porcine) and birds. Although collagen...

The linking of North and South America by the Isthmus of Panama had major impacts on global climate, oceanic and atmospheric currents, and biodiversity, yet the timing of this critical event remains contentious. The Isthmus is traditionally understood to have fully closed by ca. 3.5 million years ago (Ma), and this date has been used as a benchmark for oceanographic, climatic, and evolutionary ...