Free space is necessary for larval recruitment in all marine benthic communities. Settling corals, with limited energy to invest in competitive interactions, are particularly vulnerable during settlement into well-developed coral reef communities. This situation may be exacerbated for corals settling into coral-depauperate reefs where succession in nursery microhabitats moves rapidly toward het...

Ocean acidification is receiving increasing attention because of its potential to affect marine ecosystems. Rare CO2 vents offer a unique opportunity to investigate the response of benthic ecosystems to acidification. However, the benthic habitats investigated so far are mainly found at very shallow water (less than or equal to 5 m depth) and therefore are not representative of the broad range ...

Numerous studies have documented declines in the abundance of reef-building corals over the last several decades and in some but not all cases, phase shifts to dominance by macroalgae have occurred. These assessments, however, often ignore the remainder of the benthos and thus provide limited information on the present-day structure and function of coral reef communities. Here, using an unprece...

BACKGROUND Species distribution, abundance and diversity of mangrove benthic macroinvertebrate fauna and the relationships to environmental conditions are important parts of understanding the structure and function of mangrove ecosystems. In this study seasonal variation in the distribution of macrobenthos and related environmental parameters were explored at four mangrove stations along the Po...

Triclosan (5-chloro-2-[2,4-dichlorophenoxy]phenol) is a relatively new, commonly used antimicrobial compound found in many personal care products. Triclosan is toxic to marine organisms at the micrograms per liter level, can photodegrade to a dioxin, can accumulate in humans, and has been found to be stable in marine sediments for over 30 years. To determine the effects of triclosan on marine b...

Standard design of invertebrate activity traps limits their use to water depths that exceed the maximum foraging depth of most shorebirds. Assessment of nektonic invertebrate availability in shallow waters is desirable because shorebird diets may include these organisms. Thus, we designed a modified activity trap to assess invertebrate abundance in water depths ≤10 cm. We tested our design by c...

Our view of how water quality effects ecosystems of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is largely framed by observed or expected responses of large benthic organisms (corals, algae, seagrasses) to enhanced levels of dissolved nutrients, sediments and other pollutants in reef waters. In the case of nutrients, however, benthic organisms and communities are largely responding to materials which have cyc...

Enhancement projects within anadromous salmonid rivers of California have increased in recent years. Much of this work is intended as mitigation in regulated streams where salmon and steelhead spawning habitat is inaccessible or degraded due to dams, water diversions and channelization. Little research has been done to assess the benefits of spawning habitat enhancement to stream organisms othe...