California sea lions are one of the major marine mammal species along the Pacific coast of North America. Sea lions are susceptible to a wide variety of viruses, some of which can be transmitted to or from terrestrial mammals. Using an unbiased viral metagenomic approach, we surveyed the fecal virome in California sea lions of different ages and health statuses. Averages of 1.6 and 2.5 distinct...

950 Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 13, No. 6, June 2007 To our knowledge, detection of Bartonella spp. DNA in sea turtle blood represents the fi rst molecular evidence of Bartonella infection in nonmammalian vertebrates. B. henselae infection, now reported in porpoises and sea turtles, may represent an emerging infection of marine animals. According to previous studies, i...

THIS study intended to characterize pharmacologically the mediator(s) released in the inflammation induced by Soluble Egg Antigen (SEA), the main antigen released from eggs of Schistosoma mansoni, in rat hindpaws. A single intraplantar injection of 0.1-100 microg SEA at day zero induced a dose-dependent increase in the volume of rat hindpaws characterizing an oedema of quick onset (within 15 mi...

On amoonless night or in the depths of the sea, where light levels aremany orders of magnitude dimmer than sunlight, animals rely on their visual systems to orient andnavigate, to find foodandmates and toavoidpredators. To seewell at such low light levels is far from trivial. The paucity of light means that visual signals generated in the light-sensitive photoreceptors of the retina can easily ...

Zooplankton are commonly frozen at sea In ecological studies when it is impractical to extract liplds lrnrnediately from live animals Analysis of lipids extracted from the copepod Calanus pacificus established that freezing has neghgible effects on copepod dry mass, total lipid content, or lipid composltion resulting only in shght changes in free fatty acids However, storage for 1 yr at -15°C r...

BACKGROUND Staphylococcal enterotoxins (SEs) are the most common cause of foodborne diseases and toxic shock throughout the world. However, no vaccine that prevents emesis induced by SEs has been described. METHODS A nontoxic mutant of SEA, SEAD227A, was constructed by site-directed mutagenesis and was purified by means of the Escherichia coli expression system. House musk shrews, a small eme...

The existence of individual prey specializations has been reported for an ever-growing number of taxa, and has important ramifications for our understanding of predator–prey dynamics. We use the California sea otter population as a case study to validate the use of archival time–depth data to detect and measure differences in foraging behaviour and diet. We collected observational foraging data...

In a molecular epidemiology study using 791 fecal samples collected from different terrestrial and marine mammals in Hong Kong, genogroup I picobirnaviruses (PBVs) were positive by RT-PCR targeting the partial RdRp gene in specimens from five cattle, six monkeys, 17 horses, nine pigs, one rabbit, one dog, and 12 California sea lions, with 11, 9, 23, 17, 1, 1, and 15 sequence types in the positi...

The detection of trends in ecosystems depends upon (1) a good description of the foundation or benchmark against which changes are measured and (2) a distinction between natural and anthropogenic changes. Patterns and mechanisms observed over 25 years in a large kelp forest suggest that definition of a meaningful benchmark is impossible, because many of the large animals have been gone for year...

Sea Turtles Sea turtles are one of the oldest extant groups of animals, and they have changed little in basic anatomy for millions of years. Sea turtles are found throughout the world, and depending on the species, range from warm tropical water to frigid oceans near the arctic. They can be herbivores, omnivores, or carnivores and can be quite large. For example, the largest species of sea turt...