various coral reef fish species are highly associated with putative nursery habitats like mangroves and seagrass beds during their juvenile life stage (i.e., ‘nursery species’). Little is known, however, of the degree to which they can use other habitat types as juvenile habitat. In this study we investigated whether some nursery species can utilise alternative juvenile habitats when mangroves ...

Edge maps which are computed from textured scenes using existing methods based on local image analysis are not very meaningful. This is because edges at object boundaries are not differentiated from edges in texture. We introduce a real-time algorithm that overcomes this difficulty by computing the Direchlet integral in a small image patch at different scales. These measurements are combined an...

Understanding the consequences of fragmentation of coastal habitats is an important topic of discussion in marine ecology. Research on the effects of fragmentation has revealed complex and context-dependent biotic responses, which prevent generalizations across different habitats or study organisms. The effects of fragmentation in marine environments have been rarely investigated across heterog...

The effect of a distributed patch mass on the natural frequency of vibration of a laminated rectangular plate with simply supported boundaries is investigated. The third order displacement field of a composite laminated rectangular plate is defined using the two variable refined plate theory. Equations of motion of the plate are obtained with the help of calculus of variation. Parametric study ...

Animal travel between habitat patches affects populations, communities and ecosystems. There are three levels of organization of edge properties, and each of these can affect animals. At the lowest level are the different habitats on each side of an edge, then there is the edge itself, and finally, at the highest level of organization, is the geometry or structure of the edge. This study used c...

Species have strong indirect effects on others, and predicting these effects is a central challenge in ecology. Prey species sharing an enemy (predator or parasitoid) can be linked by apparent competition, but it is unknown whether this process is strong enough to be a community-wide structuring mechanism that could be used to predict future states of diverse food webs. Whether species abundanc...

Understanding how often individuals should move when foraging over patchy habitats is a central question in ecology. By combining optimality and functional response theories, we show analytically how the optimal movement rate varies with the average resource level (enrichment) and resource distribution (patch heterogeneity). We find that the type of functional response predicts the effect of en...