Coral reefs are the most biodiverse and biologically productive of all marine ecosystems. Corals harbor diverse and abundant prokaryotic communities. However, little is known about the diversity of coral-associated bacterial communities. Mucus is a characteristic product of all corals, forming a coating over their polyps. The coral mucus is a rich substrate for microorganisms. Mucus was collect...

An increasing proportion of the Earth's surface is illuminated at night. In aquatic ecosystems, artificial light at night (ALAN) may influence microbial communities living in the sediments. These communities are highly diverse and play an important role in the global carbon cycle. We combined field and laboratory experiments using sediments from an agricultural drainage system to examine how AL...

Abstract The Nasep and Huns members of the Urusis Formation (Nama Group), southern Namibia, preserve some most diverse trace-fossil assemblages known from latest Ediacaran worldwide, including potentially world's oldest “complex” vertical sediment-penetrating burrows. These sediments record relatively communities bilaterian metazoans existing before base Cambrian an increase in intensity metazo...

Background: The complexity and dynamical nature of community interactions make modeling a useful tool for understanding how communities develop over time and how they respond to external perturbations. Large community-evolution models (LCEMs) are particularly promising, since they can address both ecological and evolutionary questions, and can give rise to richly structured and diverse model co...

All knowledge is context dependent. The relevant context is the social community where it resides, i.e. the ‘epistemic community’ formed as groups of people define and legitimize the knowledge they possess. In the mutual engagement in a common enterprise, epistemic communities develop, maintain and nurture the codes, tools and theories that provide the basis of their practice. Commonalities of ...

X k=1 z 0k A0;k(z M)Mi01(z M): (41) This formula makes transparent exactly what happens in a recursive computation of the correlation functions. At every stage i, we have the Z-transform at points M 0i n of the appropriate function. In going to the (i + 1)st stage, the rst term Mi01(z M) ensures that values at the previous stage are retained at the even points, while the second term interpolate...

The emergence and distribution of beliefs about the origins of species is investigated in Christian fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist school communities, with participants matched by age, educational level, and locale. Children (n = 185) and mothers (n = 92) were questioned about animate, inanimate, and artifact origins, and children were asked about their interests and natural-history knowl...