BACKGROUND Farwa is an Island in Libya receives petrochemical wastes generated from General Company of Chemical Industries (GCCI) since more than 40 years. AIM The present work aimed to determine the concentrations of mercury (Hg(+2)) in fish, marine plants and sediment collected from Farwa lagoon to evaluate effect of industrial wastewater from GCCI on the marine environment. METHODS Hundr...

Humans are exposed to methylmercury (MeHg) principally by consumption of marine fish. The coastal zone supports the majority of marine fish production, and may therefore be an important source of MeHg to humans; however, little is known about the bioaccumulation of MeHg in near-shore marine ecosystems. We examined MeHg in microseston, zooplankton, a decapod crustacean, and four representative s...

The depletion of important fish stocks and the degradation of marine ecosystems are common problems worldwide. Two approaches that have been widely used to restore depleted fish stocks are the implementation of harvest control rules and the establishment of marine reserve networks. Harvest control rules, underpinned by the monitoring and assessment of the status of target stocks, provide a scie...

Blooms of alien invasive marine algae have become common, greatly altering the health and stability of nearshore marine ecosystems. Concurrently, herbivorous fishes have been severely overfished in many locations worldwide, contributing to increases in macroalgal cover. We used a multi-pronged, interdisciplinary approach to test if higher biomass of herbivorous fishes inside a no-take marine re...

In response to the global fisheries crisis, characterized by falling abundances of resource species, falling catches, increasing habitat destruction, and extremely high subsidies, the advocates of whaling have been advancing a new rationale for hunting of marine cetaceans. They claim that marine mammals, particularly the great whales, compete with humans for fish resources; that efforts to prot...

Model intercomparison studies in the climate and earth sciences communities have been crucial to build credibility and coherence for future projections. They have quantified variability among models, spurred model development, contrasted withinand among-model uncertainty, assessed model fits to historical data, and provided ensemble projections of future change under specified scenarios. Given ...

Marine invertebrates and fish are well known for their remarkable genetic diversity, which is commonly explained by large population size and the characteristic dispersive nature of their early, planktonic life history. Other potential sources of diversity in marine animals, such as a higher mutation rate, have been much less considered, though evidence for a high genetic load in marine bivalve...

A molecular phylogenetic analysis of 25 isolates of fish nodaviruses, the causative agents of viral nervous necrosis of marine fish, was performed based on the nucleotide sequences (427 bases) of the coat protein gene. These fish nodaviruses were classified into four clusters: tiger puffer nervous necrosis virus, striped jack nervous necrosis virus, berfin flounder nervous necrosis virus, and r...

Pesticides usage in agricultural fields to control pests is extremely toxic to non target organisms like fish and affect fish health through impairment of metabolism, sometimes leading to mortality. Present study is a review of potential adverse effects of pesticides and pollutants in fish. Furthermore, the data generated could be useful in the environmental risk assessment of freshwater and ma...

The species richness of freshwater environments is disproportionately high compared with that of the oceans, given their respective sizes. If diversification rates are higher in freshwaters because they are isolated and heterogeneous, this should apply to parasites as well. Using 14 large datasets comprising 677 species of freshwater and marine fish, the hypothesis that freshwater parasites exp...