A modularity approach is used to study disparity rates and evolvability of sea urchins belonging to the Atelostomata superorder. For this purpose, the pentameric sea urchin architecture is partitioned into modular spatial components and the interference between modules is quantified using areas and a measurement of the regularity of the spatial partitions. This information is used to account fo...

Megafauna play an important role in benthic ecosystem function and are sensitive indicators of environmental change. Non-invasive monitoring of benthic communities can be accomplished by seafloor imaging. However, manual quantification of megafauna in images is labor-intensive and therefore, this organism size class is often neglected in ecosystem studies. Automated image analysis has been prop...

Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus) numbers in the Western Distinct Population Segment are beginning to recover following the dramatic decline that began in the 1970s and ended around the turn of the century. Low female reproductive rates (natality) may have contributed to the decline and remain an issue of concern for this population. During the 2000s we found high natality among Steller sea...

Over five hundred and forty of seacucumbers eollected on the southern coasts of Tasmania have in the course of the present study. Seven families, 12 and 14 species are represented in the One is regarded are as new, adhaerens, TaVUtll. and Paraca.udina. Three other species have not been recorded previously from Tasmania but are known from the coast of Victoria. They are Cllcurnella Jnutans incon...

Habitat structure plays an important mediating role in predator-prey interactions. However the effects are strongly dependent on regional predator pools, which can drive predation risk in habitats with very similar structure in opposite directions. In the Mediterranean Sea predation on juvenile sea urchins is commonly known to be regulated by seagrass structure. In this study we test whether th...

Members of the phylum Echinodermata, commonly known as echinoderms, are exclusively marine invertebrates. Among the Echinodermata, sea cucumber belongs to the family Holothuroidea. The sea cucumber Stichopus (Apostichous) japonicus (Selenka) is an invertebrate animal inhabiting the coastal sea around Korean, Japan, China, and Russia. Sea cucumber has a significant commercial value, because it c...

demonstration of the geomorphological factors in setting the legal regime of the caspian seaintroduction:the caspian sea is the largest water basin which enclosed by land within eurasia continent. the caspian sea is unique in many reasons: the large deposits of oil and gas, valuable fishery resources; including 90% of the world’s stock of sturgeon, important transportation routes; connecting th...

Caspian Sea is the largest land locked water body in the world and has been characterized by significant relative sea-level changes since the Pliocene. The sea-level oscillations have strongly impacted the coastal areas depending on geomorphological setting. This study aims to investigate the impacts of sea level oscillations on low-lying coasts of the southeastern flank of the Caspian Sea...

caspian sea is the largest enclosed body of water on the earth. since the collapse of soviet union in 1991 and discovering large oil and gas fields, some issues such as political, economic and environmental events, made the caspian sea important. the ecology of the sea are being endangered due to several issues such as petroleum extraction, river and sea pollutions, water level rise, biological...