The Mediterranean Sea is known as an ecological barrier for numerous migratory birds flying from European breeding grounds to African wintering sites. Birds generally avoid migration over open sea and fly over land. In the Mediterranean Basin, few land bridges or bottlenecks for migratory birds exist. The narrowest are at the western and eastern extremes: the Strait of Gibraltar and Israel. Com...

The genus Tripterygion (Risso 1826) is restricted to the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and comprises only three species. T. melanuros and T. tripteronotus are essentially endemic to the Mediterranean, while Tripterygion delaisi occurs in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. Two subspecies of T. delaisi have been described (T. d. xanthosoma in the Mediterranean and T. d. delaisi in t...

The desiccation of the Mediterranean Sea during the Messinian Salinity Crisis 6.0-5.3 million years ago (Ma), caused a major extinction of the marine ichthyofauna of the Mediterranean. This was followed by an abrupt replenishment of the Mediterranean from the Atlantic after the opening of the Strait of Gibraltar. In this study, we combined demographic and phylogeographic approaches using mitoch...

BACKGROUND Local and regional scientific journals are important factors in bridging gaps in health knowledge translation in low-and middle-income countries. We assessed indexing, citations and publishing standards of journals from the Eastern Mediterranean region. METHODS For journals from 22 countries in the collection of the Index Medicus for the Eastern Mediterranean Region (IMEMR), we ana...

speckled shrimp (metapenaeus monoceros), is a commercially important prawn in the embayments and estuaries of the mediterranean sea. it is originally a lessepsian species which had migrated from the red sea into the mediterranean sea through the suez canal. this study was carried out in the north-eastern mediterranean sea between november 2009 and october 2010 with monthly sampling of speckled ...

Population genetic structures of the mackerel (Scomber scombrus) and chub mackerel (Scomber japonicus) were studied in the Mediterranean Sea. Fragments of 272 bp (S. scomber) and 387 bp (S. japonicus) of the 5'-end of the mitochondrial control region were sequenced from spawning individuals collected off the coasts of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. High levels of mitochondrial control regi...

The isotopic composition of neodymium in the water column of the eastern North Atlantic near the Strait of Gibraltar has been determined for several depths. The data show that the Mediterranean outflow results in a significant shift in eNa(0) toward more radiogenic values of ln3Nd/144Nd in the water column at a 1000-m depth. This corresponds to a depth in the neighborhood of the salinity maximu...

Molecular approaches have proven efficient to identify cryptic lineages within single taxonomic entities. Sometimes these cryptic lineages maybe previously unreported or unknown invasive taxa. The genetic structure of the marine gastropod Stramonita haemastoma has been examined in the Western Mediterranean and North-Eastern Atlantic populations with mtDNA COI sequences and three newly developed...

Skin auto fluorescence (SAF) is used as a proxy for the accumulation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and has been proposed to stratify patients into cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes mellitus (DM) risk groups. This study evaluates the effects of seven different ethnicities (Arab, Central-East African, Eastern Mediterranean, European, North African, South Asian and Southeast As...

      As host to some of the world’s biggest emergencies and protracted crises, the Eastern Mediterranean Region carries the largest burden of displaced populations globally. Out of 58 million displaced persons worldwide, almost 30 million (52%) come from the Region. Syria is currently the world’s biggest producer of refugees and internally displaced persons, with more than 40% of the populatio...