A systemic morbillivirus infection was diagnosed postmortem in a juvenile bottlenose dolphin stranded in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean in 2005. Sequence analysis of a conserved fragment of the morbillivirus phosphoprotein gene indicated that the virus is closely related to dolphin morbillivirus recently reported in striped dolphins in the Mediterranean Sea.

Thingstad et al. (Reports, 12 August 2005, p. 1068) reported that in situ mesoscale phosphorus enrichment of the eastern Mediterranean Sea altered selected biological parameters and concluded that the added phosphorus was rapidly transferred from bacteria to mesozooplankton. However, because of a lack of replication and a misinterpretation of their statistical analyses, that conclusion is not s...

Thalassotalea sp. strain ND16A belongs to the family Colwelliaceae and was isolated from eastern Mediterranean Sea water at a depth of 1,055 m. Members of Colwelliaceae are ubiquitous marine heterotrophs. Here, we report the draft genome sequence of Thalassotalea sp. strain ND16A, a member of the newly described genus Thalassotalea.

The surface waters of the Mediterranean Sea are extremely poor in the nutrients necessary for plankton growth. At the same time, the Mediterranean Sea borders with the largest and most active desert areas in the world and the atmosphere over the basin is subject to frequent injections of mineral dust particles. We describe statistical correlations between dust deposition over the Mediterranean ...

In this study, we investigated, for the first time, the potential impact of environmental changes on zooplankton abundance over a fourteen year period (2000-2013) at an offshore station in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea (the Levantine basin, offshore Lebanon). Samples were collected monthly and analyzed using the semi-automated system ZooScan. Salinity, temperature and phytoplankton abundance (n...

A circulation model is coupled to a Lagrangian particle-tracking model to simulate the transport floating litter particles in the Aegean Sea, Greece (Eastern Mediterranean). Considering different source regions and release dates, simulations were carried out to explore the fate and distribution of floating litter over 1990–2009, taking into account the seasonal and interannual variability of su...

We investigated five time-equivalent core sections (180^110 kyr BP) from the Balearic Sea (Menorca Rise), the easternmost Levantine Basin and southwest, south, and southeast of Crete to reconstruct spatial patterns of productivity during deposition of sapropels S5 and S6 in the Mediterranean Sea. Our indicators are Ba, total organic carbon and carbonate contents. We found no indications of Ba r...

Aspects of hydrography and large-scale circulation observed in the Mediterranean Sea during the M84/3 and P414 cruises (April and June 2011, respectively) are presented. In contrast to most of the recent expeditions, which were limited to special areas of the basin, these two cruises, especially the M84/3, offered the opportunity of delineating a quasi-synoptic picture of the distribution of th...

[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...

Satellite observations from 1985–2006 indicate that in the last 2 decades the temperature in the upper layer of the Mediterranean Sea has been increasing at an average (±SD) rate of 0.03 ± 0.008°C yr–1 for the western basin and 0.05 ± 0.009°C yr–1 for the eastern basin. The increases in temperature are not constant throughout the year but occur primarily during May, June and July. Maximum incre...