Methylmercury (MeHg) is a contaminant of global concern that bioaccumulates and bioamagnifies in marine food webs. Lower trophic level fauna are important conduits of MeHg from sediment and water to estuarine and coastal fish harvested for human consumption. However, the sources and pathways of MeHg to these coastal fisheries are poorly known particularly the potential for transfer of MeHg from...

Unicellular algae such as phytoplankton and benthic microalgae have an elemental ratio of carbon to nitrogen to phosphorus (C/N/P) of approximately 106:16:1, known as the Redfield ratio. Benthic plants, including benthic macroalgae and seagrass, have a significantly different and more variable C/N/P ratio, with a median of 550:30:1, herein called the Atkinson ratio. In this paper, the implicati...

benthic organisms have been studied in past to assess the health of an aquatic ecosystem. moreover, being sedentary forms they have been used as indicator organisms. in the present study, an attempt has been made to study the distribution and assemblage of major macrobenthic forms occurring in ponnani estuary. a total of 23 genera of benthic invertebrate fauna belonging to 6 groups viz., polych...

Forty two Paleocene benthic foraminiferal species of the Midway Formation in the Gulf Coastal Plain of Texas, USA were firstly investigated by Plummer (1927), and its paleogeographic distribution in some other countries in the Tethyan province were recorded: North America (USA, Mexico), South America (Argentina), Europe (North Sea Basin, Spain, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Bulgaria), North Af...

Sediment properties, microphytobenthos biomass (chlorophyll a and phaeopigments), and the structure of the benthic communities of the three main lagoons (Mirim, Imaruí and Santo Antonio) of the Laguna Estuarine System, South Brazil, were analyzed during summer and winter. Microphytobenthos biomass did not differ significantly among the lagoons, but showed higher values in the summer. The macrof...

Benthic macroinvertebrates constitute the link between organic matter input in streams and fishes. However, the possibility of influence of predators on the invertebrates is still a controversial issue. The possibility of alteration of the benthic community by the modification in predation in a stream in the South of Brazil was studied by means of an exclusion experiment under semi-natural cond...