Species range boundaries are determined by a variety of factors of which climate is one of the most influential. As a result, climate change is expected to have a profound effect on organisms and ecosystems. However, the impacts of weather and climate are frequently modified by multiple nonclimatic factors. Therefore, the role of these nonclimatic factors needs to be examined in order to unders...

The population development of the 1998 year class of the bivalve Macoma balthica was studied by repeated sampling of a tidal flat area in the eastern Dutch Wadden Sea from May 1998 to August 2000. The juveniles migrated twice, once in mid-1998 from their primary settlement locations in the low sandy intertidal to the nursery in the high intertidal (spring migration, 25% of all juvenile M. balth...

Many theories of consumer control of communities have come from studies conducted in relatively benign, temperate zone rocky intertidal systems. Here, we examine gastropod grazing and the maintenance of bare space on a dry, wind-swept rocky shore of Patagonia, Argentina. Two limpet species are the primary intertidal grazers. Siphonaria lessoni dominates mid and high intertidal zones, while Nace...

The ability to withstand high summer temperatures is an extremely important determinant of species distributions in the intertidal zone; most marine organisms cannot live intertidally because of the harsh conditions experienced during aerial emersion. The members of some species, though, live both intertidally and subtidally, and their physiological tolerance to stressors may differ depending o...

BACKGROUND Biological invasions affecting rocky intertidal zonation patterns, yield information on species interactions. In the Bay of Antofagasta, northern Chile, the non-indigenous tunicate Pyura praeputialis, originally from Australia, has invaded (in the past century or so) and monopolized a major portion of the mid-intertidal rocky shore, displacing upshore the native mussel Perumytilus pu...

Although previous studies have demonstrated that heat-shock protein 70 (Hsp70) can be induced by environmental stress, little is known about natural variation in this response over short time scales. We examined how Hsp70 levels varied over days to weeks in two intertidal snail species of the genus Tegula: Sampling was conducted both under naturally changing environmental conditions and in diff...

Abstract—Sediments are an important source of accumulation of toxic contaminants within the aquatic environment. Bioassays are a powerful tool for the study of sediments in relation to their toxicity, but they can be expensive. This article presents a methodology to estimate the main physical property of intertidal sediments in coastal zones: heavy metals concentration. This study, which was de...

Coastal zones act as a sink for riverine and atmospheric nitrogen inputs and thereby buffer the open ocean from the effects of anthropogenic activity. Recently, microbial activity in sandy permeable sediments has been identified as a dominant source of N-loss in coastal zones, namely through denitrification. Some of the highest coastal denitrification rates measured so far occur within the inte...

coastal monitoring programs are valuable tools for assessing the current state of coastal environments, for determining spatial and temporal trends in pollution and identifying potential sources of contaminants. monitoring often involves organisms from different environments, such as estuarine and intertidal zones, where conditions (e.g. salinity, temperature) fluctuate. Biomarkers “report” on ...

The influence of predation on rocky intertidal community structure has long emphasized the importance of indirect interactions. Most efforts in this area have focused on the density-mediated, or lethal effects, of predators on prey density. Recently, there has been growing interest in trait-mediated indirect interactions (TMIIs): the presence of a predator in the environment influences the inte...