The European purple sea urchin (Paracentrotus lividus) is considered to be a key herbivore throughout its distribution range--North-East Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea. It was also abundant in its eastern distributional edge, on rocky habitats of the coastline of Israel, but its populations have recently collapsed, and today it is an extremely rare species in the region. Field and laboratory ex...

Two years of TOPEX/POSEIDON altimeter data have successfully been used to study the mesoscale field in the Mediterranean and to investigate the seasonal and year-toyear variability of the sea level and eddy statistics in this basin. The mesoscale field described by TOPEX/POSEIDON revealed a strong, but subbasin dependent, seasonal signal. Year-toyear variations are also evident in terms of both...

The bioinvasion of the Mediterranean from the Red Sea via the Suez Canal, called Lessepsian bioinvasion, was used as a way to uncover the invading potential of different genetic clades. Populations of blotchfin dragonet Callionymus filamentosus were assessed, based on 2 mitochondrial markers (control region and cytochrome oxidase 1) and 2 nuclear markers (2nd intron of the ribosomal protein S7 ...

BACKGROUND Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (ABFT) shows complex demography and ecological variation in the Mediterranean Sea. Genetic surveys have detected significant, although weak, signals of population structuring; catch series analyses and tagging programs identified complex ABFT spatial dynamics and migration patterns. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the genetic structure of the ABFT in the Med...

The gills of 63 specimens of the Atlantic bluefin tuna Thunnus thynnus (Linnaeus) (Osteichthyes: Scombridae) from three localities of the Mediterranean (Sardinian, Tyrrhenian and Levantine Seas) were examined for metazoan parasites. The parasite fauna of T. thynnus from the Sea of Sardinia included 11 species: five didymozoid trematodes, three capsalid and one hexostomid monogeneans, and one ca...

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 semienclosed western Mediterranean Sea has proven to be a useful location to evaluate surface heat flux estimates. In the past the directly measured average oceanic heat transport from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar of ;5.2 6 1.3 W m has been compared to estimates of the average heat flux across the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. On long timescale...

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...

Genetic variation was surveyed at nine microsatellite loci and the mitochondrial control region (868 bp) to test for the presence of genetic stock structure in young-of-the-year Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus thynnus) from the Mediterranean Sea. Bluefin tuna were sampled over a period of 5 years from the Balearic and Tyrrhenian seas in the western basin of the Mediterranean Sea, and fro...