Low food availability is a major structuring force in deep-sea benthic communities, sustaining only very low densities of organisms in parts of the abyss. These low population densities may result in an Allee effect, whereby local reproductive success is inhibited, and populations are maintained by larval dispersal from bathyal slopes. This slope-abyss source-sink (SASS) hypothesis suggests tha...

I investigated mechanisms of parasitoid coexistence in a spatially structured host–multiparasitoid community (harlequin bugs [Murgantia histrionica] and two specialist parasitoids [Trissolcus murgantiae and Ooencyrtus johnsonii ]). I tested both local and metapopulation hypotheses. The local hypothesis, intraguild predation, predicts coexistence if the inferior larval competitor is superior at ...

The bipartite life history of most marine organisms leads to complex patterns of replenishment in benthic populations. High variation in adult spawning, dynamic oceanographic currents, and often unknown larval behaviors create challenges in accurately predicting spatial and temporal patterns in the supply and settlement of pelagic larvae to nearshore juvenile habitats. Yet, understanding and pr...

To examine the relative roles of physical and biological processes involved in the recruitment of reef fishes, temporal and spatial patterns of supply and recruitment were measured for two fishes, Stegastes partitus (Poey) (Pomacentridae) and Acanthurus bahianus Castelnau (Acanthuridae), recruiting to Barbados, West Indies. Nightly light-trap collections of late-stage larvae were compared with ...

Larval dispersal by ocean currents is a critical component of systematic marine protected area (MPA) design. However, there is a lack of quantitative methods to incorporate larval dispersal in support of increasingly diverse management objectives, including local population persistence under multiple types of threats (primarily focused on larval retention within and dispersal between protected ...

Darwin's northern suburbs border an extensive coastal reed and upper mangrove wetland recognized as an important larval habitat for Aedes vigilax (Skuse), the northern salt marsh mosquito, an established vector for Ross River and Barmah Forest viruses and an appreciable pest species. We sought to identify the most important vegetation categories associated with Ae. vigilax breeding to maximize ...

Like most benthic marine organisms, coral reef fishes produce larvae that traverse open ocean waters before settling and metamorphosing into juveniles. Where larvae are transported and how they survive is a central question in marine and fisheries ecology. While there is increasing success in modelling potential larval trajectories, our knowledge of the physical and biological processes contrib...

The variability in zooplankton fatty acid composition may be an indicator of larval fish habitat quality as fatty acids are linked to fish larval growth and survival. We sampled an anadromous fish nursery, the Chowan River, during spring of 2013 in order to determine how the seston fatty acid composition varied in comparison with the zooplankton community composition and fatty acid composition ...

Metapopulation models have historically treated a landscape as a collection of habitat patches separated by a matrix of uniformly unsuitable habitat. This perspective is still apparent in many studies of marine metapopulations, in which recruitment variation is generally assumed to be primarily the result of variability in ocean currents and interactions with disperser behavior, with little con...

this study examines the assumption that plant resistance to herbivory has fitness costs. to assess costs, i used the standard method of determining whether there is a significant negative genetic correlation between the resistance character and damage in the presence of herbivory and with fitness in the absence of herbivory. seeds of five plants from four genotypes of arabidopsis thaliana were ...