By means of a series of borehole resistivity measurements and a resistivity±salinity relation, a particular salt-freshwater inversion was found under the shore with semi-diurnal tides at the French±Belgian border. These resistivity data provide valuable information about the vertical variation of the saltwater percentage in di€erent boreholes. At di€erent places and depths ̄uctuations of freshwa...

Saltwater tolerance is a trait that carries both ecological and epidemiological significance for Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit human malaria, as it plays a key role in determining their habitat use and ecological distribution, and thus their local contribution to malaria transmission. Here, we lay the groundwork for genetic dissection of this trait by quantifying saltwater tolerance in thr...

The significance of salinity in shaping bacterial communities dwelling in estuarine areas has been well documented. However, the influences of other environmental factors such as dissolved oxygen and nutrients in determining distribution patterns of both individual taxa and bacterial communities inhabited local estuarine regions remain elusive. Here, bacterioplankton community structures of sur...

How plants arrived to originally sterile oceanic islands has puzzled naturalists for centuries. Dispersal syndromes (i.e., diaspore traits that promote dispersal by long-distance dispersal vectors), are generally considered to play a determinant role in assisting island colonization. However, the association between diaspore traits and the potential vectors by which diaspores are dispersed is n...

Many migratory vertebrates typically move between habitats with varying salinities during the annual cycle. These organisms clearly exhibit a remarkable phenotypic flexibility in their 'osmoregulatory machinery', but the metabolic consequences of salinity acclimatization are still not well understood. We investigated the effects of salinity on basal metabolic rate (BMR), body mass and daily ene...

Reduced vigilance is the conspicuous cost of sleep in most animals. To mitigate against this cost, some birds and aquatic mammals have evolved the ability to sleep with one-half of their brain at a time, a phenomenon known as unihemispheric sleep. During unihemispheric sleep the eye neurologically connected to the 'awake' hemisphere remains open while the other eye is closed. Such unilateral ey...

Abstract:   A two-dimensional fully implicit finite difference model, which can be easily extended to three dimensions, is developed to study the effect of cut-off walls on saltwater intrusion into the aquifers. This model consists of a coupled system of two nonlinear partial differential equations which describe unsteady density-driven groundwater flow and solute transport. The numerica...