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Brevetoxicosis: red tides and marine mammal mortalities 总被引:2,自引:0,他引:2
Flewelling LJ Naar JP Abbott JP Baden DG Barros NB Bossart GD Bottein MY Hammond DG Haubold EM Heil CA Henry MS Jacocks HM Leighfield TA Pierce RH Pitchford TD Rommel SA Scott PS Steidinger KA Truby EW Van Dolah FM Landsberg JH 《Nature》2005,435(7043):755-756
Potent marine neurotoxins known as brevetoxins are produced by the 'red tide' dinoflagellate Karenia brevis. They kill large numbers of fish and cause illness in humans who ingest toxic filter-feeding shellfish or inhale toxic aerosols. The toxins are also suspected of having been involved in events in which many manatees and dolphins died, but this has usually not been verified owing to limited confirmation of toxin exposure, unexplained intoxication mechanisms and complicating pathologies. Here we show that fish and seagrass can accumulate high concentrations of brevetoxins and that these have acted as toxin vectors during recent deaths of dolphins and manatees, respectively. Our results challenge claims that the deleterious effects of a brevetoxin on fish (ichthyotoxicity) preclude its accumulation in live fish, and they reveal a new vector mechanism for brevetoxin spread through food webs that poses a threat to upper trophic levels. 相似文献
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Complex networks of interactions are ubiquitous and are particularly important in ecological communities, in which large numbers of species exhibit negative (for example, competition or predation) and positive (for example, mutualism) interactions with one another. Nestedness in mutualistic ecological networks is the tendency for ecological specialists to interact with a subset of species that also interact with more generalist species. Recent mathematical and computational analysis has suggested that such nestedness increases species richness. By examining previous results and applying computational approaches to 59 empirical data sets representing mutualistic plant–pollinator networks, we show that this statement is incorrect. A simpler metric—the number of mutualistic partners a species has—is a much better predictor of individual species survival and hence, community persistence. Nestedness is, at best, a secondary covariate rather than a causative factor for biodiversity in mutualistic communities. Analysis of complex networks should be accompanied by analysis of simpler, underpinning mechanisms that drive multiple higher-order network properties. 相似文献
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Goldman M. A. LoVerde P. T. Chrisman C. L. Franklin D. A. Matthews F. Pitchford R. J. Richards C. S. 《Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS》1983,39(8):911-913
Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences - A method is described for the demonstration of nucleolar organizer regions (NORs) in freshwater snails and is applied to the study of one tetraploid and... 相似文献
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Scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour 总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1
Sims DW Southall EJ Humphries NE Hays GC Bradshaw CJ Pitchford JW James A Ahmed MZ Brierley AS Hindell MA Morritt D Musyl MK Righton D Shepard EL Wearmouth VJ Wilson RP Witt MJ Metcalfe JD 《Nature》2008,451(7182):1098-1102
Many free-ranging predators have to make foraging decisions with little, if any, knowledge of present resource distribution and availability. The optimal search strategy they should use to maximize encounter rates with prey in heterogeneous natural environments remains a largely unresolved issue in ecology. Lévy walks are specialized random walks giving rise to fractal movement trajectories that may represent an optimal solution for searching complex landscapes. However, the adaptive significance of this putative strategy in response to natural prey distributions remains untested. Here we analyse over a million movement displacements recorded from animal-attached electronic tags to show that diverse marine predators-sharks, bony fishes, sea turtles and penguins-exhibit Lévy-walk-like behaviour close to a theoretical optimum. Prey density distributions also display Lévy-like fractal patterns, suggesting response movements by predators to prey distributions. Simulations show that predators have higher encounter rates when adopting Lévy-type foraging in natural-like prey fields compared with purely random landscapes. This is consistent with the hypothesis that observed search patterns are adapted to observed statistical patterns of the landscape. This may explain why Lévy-like behaviour seems to be widespread among diverse organisms, from microbes to humans, as a 'rule' that evolved in response to patchy resource distributions. 相似文献
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