While lunar rhythms are commonly documented in plants and animals living in terrestrial and shallow-water environments, deep-sea organisms have essentially been overlooked in that respect. This report describes evidence of lunar periodicity in the reproduction of 6 deep-sea species belonging to 2 phyla. Occurrences of gamete release in free spawners and larval release in brooders exhibited sign...

European eels (Anguilla anguilla) undertake spawning migrations of more than 5000 km from continental Europe and North Africa to frontal zones in the Sargasso Sea. Subsequently, the larval offspring are advected by large-scale eastward ocean currents towards continental waters. However, the Sargasso Sea is oligotrophic, with generally low plankton biomass, and the feeding biology of eel larvae ...

January 25, 1995: On a dark evening in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Somalia, a merchant vessel was steaming southward when its crew began to notice a strange glow in the distance. Within minutes, and for six hours thereafter, the S.S. Lima found herself cutting through waters producing a radiant white glow reminiscent of a boundless snowfield. Ten years later, scientists learning of Lima’s ...

Continental boundary currents are projected to be altered under future scenarios of climate change. As these currents often influence dispersal and connectivity among populations of many marine organisms, changes to boundary currents may have dramatic implications for population persistence. Networks of marine protected areas (MPAs) often aim to maintain connectivity, but anticipation of the sc...

The objective of this article is to find the optimal trajectory of a pumping ship, used to clean oil spots in the open sea, in order to pump the maximum quantity of pollutant on a fixed time period. We use a model previously developed to simulate the evolution of the oil spots concentration due to the coupling of diffusion, transport from the wind, sea currents and pumping process and reaction ...

The worldwide deployment of Argo floats has enabled much more detailed studies of global and regional seas over the last decade. Here, the seasonal variability of the mixed layer depth (MLD) within the Coral Sea was examined with CTD profiles from Argo floats. Multiple threshold values for both temperature and density have been employed to determine the most suitable threshold values for the Co...

The rapid Arctic summer sea ice reduction in the last decade has lead to debates in the maritime industries on the possibility of an increase in cargo transportation in the region. Average sailing times on the North Sea Route along the Siberian Coast have fallen from 20 days in the 1990s to 11 days in 2012– 2013, attributed to easing sea ice conditions along the Siberian coast. However, the eco...

A multi-nested approach has been employed for numerical simulations in the northern part of the Aegean Sea in the framework of the MFSTEP (Mediterranean Forecast System: Toward Environmental Predictions) project. The high resolution (∼1.6 km) hydrodynamic model of the North Aegean Sea (NAS) has been nested within a coarser model of the Eastern Mediterranean (resolution ∼3.6 km) which is also ne...

of the Dalmatian coast type, formed primarily from karst limestone, Eastern Adriatic coast shows great diversity of habitats. This diversity is also influenced by the position of the Adriatic Basin, stretching from northwest to southeast, climatic differences along its length, and the direction of sea currents. Habitats in the submerged karst characteristic for the Croatian side of the Adriatic...