The trade in live crustaceans implies keeping these animals alive after capture and/or farming until purchase by the final consumer. Regarding animal welfare, the European Union includes cephalopods in Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, but there are no further regulations on crustaceans in EU legislation. The present study analysed the provisions of...

Nitrification, a biological link between the oxidized and reduced pools of inorganic nitrogen is typically limited by the first step, ammonia oxidation. Often controlled by ammonia oxidizing archaea (AOA), nitrification involves archaea within Thaumarcheota as well as bacteria from Gammaproteobacteria and Betaproteobacteria. This study examines how AOA associate with the ammonia oxidizing bacte...

The occurrence of coral diseases associated with bacterial infection increases dramatically with increasing sea surface temperatures. However, the mechanism by which elevated seawater temperature actually induces or causes coral disease is poorly understood. One possibility is that increasing seawater temperature causes a change in the community structure of bacteria inhabiting healthy coral ti...

Ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) outnumber ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) in many terrestrial and aquatic environments. Although nitrification is the primary function of aquarium biofilters, very few studies have investigated the microorganisms responsible for this process in aquaria. This study used quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) to quantify the ammonia monooxygenase (amoA) and 16S rRNA ge...

Artificial intelligence research on creative design has led to Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) models that emphasize functions as abstractions for organizing understanding of physical systems. Empirical studies on understanding complex systems suggest that novice understanding is shallow, typically focusing on their visible structures and showing minimal understanding of their functions and i...

Many species of fishes are aggressive when placed in small aquaria. Aggression can negatively affect the welfare of those individuals toward whom it is directed. Animals may behave aggressively in order to defend resources such as food, shelter, mates, and offspring. The decision to defend depends on the distribution of resources and on ecological factors such as number of competitors, amount o...