Chronic undersampling of the marine environment, including both biological and physical components, has been and remains a major block to understanding how marine ecosystems function and how they respond to changes, whether natural or anthropogenic. Consequently, data-based models that accurately predict local variations in the abundance of plant and animal life in the sea are rare or do not ex...

Marine biology is a hybrid subject that combines aspects of organismal function, ecological interaction and the study of marine biodiversity.[1] The earliest studies of marine biology can be traced back to the Phoenicians and the Greeks who are known as the initial explorers of the oceans and their composition.[2] However, it was Aristotle (384-322 BC) who was the first to record any observatio...

Drugs from the sea? Darwin may not have considered this concept when he was thinking about mechanisms that drove diversification of life on earth. In recognition of his 200th year, and celebration of the publication in 1859 of his "On the origin of species", we review the global status of marine biodiscovery in medicinal fields, with a focus on the South Pacific. Furthermore, in the Darwinian s...

On June 2013 a workshop at the University of Siena (Italy) was organized to review current knowledge and to clarify what is known, and what remains to be investigated, concerning plastic litter in the sea. The content of the workshop was designed to contribute further to the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) following an inaugural workshop in 2012. Here we report a number of s...

The wide chemical and biological diver extraordinary source of high added value served in the marine environment makes the ocean an nds (HAVC) which can be employed in many applications. d proteins from marine sources have unique features and, found in parts of marine organisms that are commonly of the chief methodo

Marine organisms modify the distribution of radioisotopes in the oceanic ecosystem. Various vital processes of plants and animals concentrate elements. The distributions of the biota are often independent of their watery environment; they may actively migrate vertically or horizontally or may remain in place while the water moves past them. In the case of plankton, the concentrating organisms p...

persistent organic pollutants (pops) have widely aroused public concern due to their ubiquity,environmental persistence, long-range transportability, bioaccumulation capacities and potentially adverse effectson living organisms. dakar is located in the industrial zone of senegal (80% of industrial activities) and inhabits25% of senegalese population leading to an ideal sink of these persistent ...

Significant warming has been observed in every ocean, yet our ability to predict the consequences of oceanic warming on marine biodiversity remains poor. Experiments have been severely limited because, until now, it has not been possible to manipulate seawater temperature in a consistent manner across a range of marine habitats. We constructed a "hot-plate" system to directly examine ecological...

Introduced marine species are a major environmental and economic problem. The rate of these biological invasions has substantially increased in recent years due to the globalization of the world's economies. The damage caused by invasive species is often a result of the higher densities and larger sizes they attain compared to where they are native. A prominent hypothesis explaining the success...

Although the prevailing paradigm has held that the polar night is a period of biological quiescence, recent studies have detected noticeable activity levels in marine organisms. In this study, we investigated the circadian rhythm of the scallop Chlamys islandica by continuously recording the animal's behaviour over 3 years in the Arctic (Svalbard). Our results showed that a circadian rhythm per...