Maintaining good soil productivity in rice paddies is important for global food security. Numerous methods have been developed to evaluate paddy soil productivity (PSP), most based on soil physiochemical properties and relatively few on biological indices. Here, we used a long-term dataset from experiments on paddy fields at eight county sites and a short-term dataset from a single field experi...

Data collected from 20 major river basins between 1993 and 1995 as part of the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) Program were analyzed to assess patterns in introduced and native fish species richness and abundance relative to watershed characteristics and stream physicochemistry. Sites (N = 157) were divided into three regions-northeast, southeast, and wes...

Hatchery-reared fish are commonly stocked into freshwaters to enhance recreational angling. As these fishes are often of high trophic position and attain relatively large sizes, they potentially interact with functionally similar resident fishes and modify food-web structure. Hatchery-reared barbel Barbus barbus are frequently stocked to enhance riverine cyprinid fish communities in Europe; the...

Perchlorate is a known environmental contaminant, largely due to widespread military use as a propellant. Perchlorate acts pharmacologically as a competitive inhibitor of thyroidal iodide uptake in mammals, but the impacts of perchlorate contamination in aquatic ecosystems and, in particular, the effects on fish are unclear. Our studies aimed to investigate the effects of concentrations of ammo...

We used nestedness analysis to seek non-random patterns in the structure of component communities of metazoan parasites collected from 31 sympatric fish species from the northeastern Bothnian Bay, the most oligohaline area of the Baltic Sea. Only 8 marine parasite species were found among the 63 species recorded, although some marine fish species reproduce in the bay and others occasionally vis...

Two of the major limitations to effective management of coral reef ecosystems are a lack of information on the spatial distribution of marine species and a paucity of data on the interacting environmental variables that drive distributional patterns. Advances in marine remote sensing, together with the novel integration of landscape ecology and advanced niche modelling techniques provide an unp...

Largely used as a natural biological tag in studies of dispersal/connectivity of fish, otolith elemental fingerprinting is usually analyzed by laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). LA-ICP-MS produces an elemental fingerprint at a discrete time-point in the life of a fish and can generate data on within-otolith variability of that fingerprint. The presence of w...

In teleost fish, as in other vertebrates, calcium is of key importance for numerous physiological processes. The skeleton of vertebrates consists mainly of calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate. It serves an important role as it determines body shape, protective aspects (scales, bone plates) and as a buffer internal reservoir for calcium and phosphorus. In teleosts, ~99% of the whole-body cal...

1. Biological resilience is of heightened concern in increasingly anthropogenic landscapes. Quantification of faunal resilience across a wide range of spatial scales and geographical areas is necessary to understand factors influencing the rate and degree of recovery, especially in fragmented ecosystems. 2. We evaluated the recovery of a riverine fish assemblage from a major diesel oil pipeline...

The seawater fish Oligoplites palometa (Cuvier,1833) is found in the American continent, from Guatemala to the coastline of São Paulo, Brazil. Below this area, it does not occur frequently. (MENEZES & FIGUEIREDO,1980). Scientific literature on its biology is scarce. However, studies have shown that this species presents lepidophagous habits. Lepidophagy is characteristic to some fishes that mus...