Increased awareness of climate change and invasive species has resulted in a surge of studies on how climate change impacts the invasibility of communities. A common method of study is comparing temperature ranges of native or naturalized species to those of highly invasive species. Two fouling community animals that have been so compared are the ascidians Botryllus schlosseri and Botrylloides ...

cyprinodontid, hermaphroditic fish that inhabits tropical mangrove forests in Florida, the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America. They inhabit crab burrows or small pools with an ephemeral water supply. Evaporative water loss, windblown tides and rainfall routinely alter water salinity to either hypoor hypersaline conditions (Abel et al., 1987). R. marmoratus are incredibly tolerant ...

Tunicates are the closest relatives to vertebrates and include the only chordate species able to reproduce both sexually and asexually. The colonial tunicate Botryllus schlosseri is embedded in a transparent extracellular matrix (the tunic) containing the colonial circulatory system (CCS). The latter is a network of vessels external to zooids, limited by a simple, flat epithelium that originate...

An unusual infection by tunicate ascidians on the trunk part of a seahorse caught by gill ne ing in the Eastern Black Sea Region of Turkey was observed. The colour, zooid diameter and width of the zooids colony of tunicate was determined. The present study is the first report of this condition on seahorses. * Corresponding author’s e-mail: [email protected] Tunicates are marine invertebrate ani...

Allorecognition has been well-studied in the context of vertebrate adaptive immunity and recognition of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), which is the central event of vertebrate immune responses. Although allorecognition systems have been identified throughout the metazoa, recent results have shown that there is no apparent conservation or orthologous relationship between the mechani...