Although most reef-building corals live near the upper threshold of their thermotolerance, some scleractinians are resilient to temperature increases. For instance, Pocillopora acuta specimens from an upwelling habitat in Southern Taiwan survived a nine-month experimental exposure to 30°C, a temperature hypothesized to induce stress. To gain a greater understanding of the molecular pathways und...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The sedge genus Carex, the most diversified angiosperm genus of the northern temperate zone, is renowned for its holocentric chromosomes and karyotype variability. The genus exhibits high variation in chromosome numbers both among and within species. Despite the possibility that this chromosome evolution may play a role in the high species diversity of Carex, population-leve...

[1] We conducted measurements of methane (CH4) emission and ecosystem respiration on >200 points across the Arctic coastal tundra near Barrow, Alaska, United States, in July 2007 and August 2008. This site contains broad diversity in tundra microtopography, including polygonal tundra, thaw lakes, and drained lake basins. In 2007, we surveyed CH4 emissions across this landscape, and found that s...

Monoecy and protogyny are widespread in wind-pollinated plants and have been interpreted as outcrossing mechanisms, though few studies have investigated their function. Carex, a large genus of anemophilous herbs, is predominantly monoecious and many species are protogynous. We investigated whether monoecy and protogyny limit self-pollination in seven Carex species. We conducted field experiment...

Sinularia polydactyla (Ehrenberg, 1834) is re-described and a lectotype assigned. This led to examination of related material from various Indo-Pacific regions. Consequently, Sinularia levi sp. n. is described from Eilat, Israel (Gulf of Aqaba, northern Red Sea) and Sinularia compressa Tixier-Durivault, 1945 and Sinularia candidula Verseveldt and Benayahu, 1983 are synonymized with Sinularia po...

Room-temperature ionic liquids (ILs) are being promoted as environmentally friendly alternatives to volatile organic solvents currently used by industry. Because ILs are novel and not yet in widespread use, their potential impact on aquatic organisms is unclear. We studied the effects of several ILs on the survivorship and behavior (movement and feeding rates) of the freshwater pulmonate snail,...

The present study characterizes the satellite DNA sequences of three endemic Hawaiian spiders, Tetragnatha acuta, Tetragnatha hawaiensis, and Tetragnatha quasimodo, to test the degree of conservation of these sequences within a closely related group of arthropods. The length and nucleotide composition of repeats of the three species is very similar both at intra- and inter-specific level. Howev...

To examine global warming's effect on soil organic carbon (SOC) decomposition in Asian monsoon forests, we conducted a soil warming experiment with a multichannel automated chamber system in a 55-year-old warm-temperate evergreen broadleaved forest in southern Japan. We established three treatments: control chambers for total soil respiration, trenched chambers for heterotrophic respiration (Rh...