A new interstitial copepod of the family Laophontidae was found in the samples from a sandy beach at Taean, west coast of Korea. This species was described and named as Quinquelaophonte koreana sp. nov. Present new species is clearly distinguishable from its congeners with the combined characters of the short caudal ramus and its short ornamented seta V, two setae on the antennary exopod, and s...

A major goal in evolutionary biology is to understand how and why populations differentiate, both genetically and phenotypically, as they invade a novel habitat. A classical example of adaptation is the pale colour of beach mice, relative to their dark mainland ancestors, which colonized the isolated sandy dunes and barrier islands on Florida's Gulf Coast. However, much less is known about diff...

Empirical patterns that emerge from an examination of food webs over gradients of environmental variation can help to predict the implications of anthropogenic disturbance on ecosystems. This "dynamic food web approach" is rarely applied at the coastal margin where aquatic and terrestrial systems are coupled and human development activities are often concentrated. We propose a simple model of g...

Evaluating impacts to biodiversity requires ecologically informed comparisons over sufficient time spans. The vulnerability of coastal ecosystems to anthropogenic and climate change-related impacts makes them potentially valuable indicators of biodiversity change. To evaluate multidecadal change in biodiversity, we compared results from intertidal surveys of 13 sandy beaches conducted in the 19...

Sandy beaches are the globe’s longest interface region between the oceans and the continents, forming highly permeable boundaries across which matter flows readily. Stranded marine carrion supplies a high-quality food source to scavengers, but the role of animal carcasses is generally under-reported in sandy-beach food webs. We examined the response of scavengers to pulsed subsidies in the form...

The size of the Convoluta roscoffensis population on a beach in Herm, Channel Islands is subject to wide seasonal variation, being very low in early summer and high in autumn and winter. Of the ecological factors measured, only light -expressed a s photosynthetically active radiation showed a correlation with population size. Low worm numbers, and also low numbers of algae and chlorophyll a con...