In light of the deteriorating state of coral reefs worldwide, the need to rehabilitate marine environments has greatly increased. Artificial reefs (ARs) have been suggested as a tool for reef conservation and rehabilitation. Although successions of AR communities have been thoroughly studied, current understanding of the interactions between artificial and natural reefs (NRs) is poor and a fund...

1. Documenting species abundance distributions in natural environments is critical to ecology and conservation biology. Tropical forest insect faunas vary in space and time, and these partitions can differ in their contribution to overall species diversity. 2. In the Neotropics, the Central American butterfly fauna is best known in terms of general natural history, but butterfly community diver...

Atlantis II and Discovery are two hydrothermal and hypersaline deep-sea pools in the Red Sea rift that are characterized by strong thermohalo-stratification and temperatures steadily peaking near the bottom. We conducted comprehensive vertical profiling of the microbial populations in both pools and highlighted the influential environmental factors. Pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA genes revealed...

OBJECTIVES UK guidance advises HIV-positive women to abstain from breast feeding. Although this eliminates the risk of postnatal vertical transmission of HIV, the impact of replacement feeding on mothers is often overlooked. This qualitative study examines, for the first time in the UK, decision-making about infant feeding among African women living with HIV. METHODS Between 2010 and 2011, we...

Oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) are natural physical features of the world's oceans. They create steep physiochemical gradients in the water column, which most notably include a dramatic draw down in oxygen concentrations over small vertical distances (<100 m). Microbial communities within OMZs play central roles in ocean and global biogeochemical cycles, yet we still lack a fundamental understandi...

Methane production by methanogens in mangrove sediments is known to contribute significantly to global warming, but studies on the shift of methanogenic community in response to anthropogenic contaminations were still limited. In this study, the effect of anthropogenic activities in the mangrove sediments along the north and south coastlines of Singapore were investigated by pyrosequencing of t...