Artificial reefs are used to compensate the destruction of marine ecosystems. In the present study, the effects of artificial reefs were compared to natural sites. For this purpose, five treatments including four different forms (Reef ball (R), Laneh Mahi (L), used materials (U) and R+L+U) of artificial reefs and one control were established. The reefs were deployed at Bandar Lengeh, the Pers...

The debate on whether artificial reefs produce new fish or simply attract existing fish biomass continues due to the difficulty in distinguishing these processes, and there remains considerable doubt as to whether artificial reefs are a harmful form of habitat modification. The harm typically associated with attraction is that fish will be easier to harvest due to the existing biomass aggregati...

The application of artificial reefs (ARs) has a long history, and there is a wealth of information related to the design and performance of ARs in coastal and ocean waters worldwide. However, relatively fewer studies in the literature are focused on the response of benthic communities within the reef areas than those on fish attraction and fish production and on the settlement and colonization ...

We describe the two species of the toxic Pfiesteria complex to date (Pfiesteria piscicida and Pfiesteria shumwayae), their complex life cycles, and the characteristics required for inclusion within this complex. These species resemble P. piscicida Steidinger & Burkholder and also have a) strong attraction to fresh fish tissues and excreta, b) toxic activity stimulated by live fish, and c) produ...

Social aggregations of fish are extremely common in nature. Pitcher (1983) defines a social aggregation of fish as a shoal, with a highly polarized shoal constituting a school. The ultimate causes of fish shoaling have been extensively studied and are well established, with the main causes being protection from predators and enhanced foraging ability. The proximate mechanisms by which groups ar...

Salmonid farming affects both the environment and other industries, with impacts of wild fish attracted to fish farms being a major concern. Here, we summarized existing knowledge on the impacts of such aggregations around open-cage salmonid farms in Norway on the environment and human activities and on the interactions of these impacts. Waste fish feed is considered the major cause for the att...

Long branch attraction is a problem that afflicts phylogenetic methods and a procedure to detect a data set suffering from this problem is the long branch extraction method[1]. This method has been well cited and used by many authors for their analysis but no strong validation has been performed as to its accuracy. We performed such an analysis by an extensive search of the branch length search...