Publications by authors named "Jonathan Houghton"

Objectives: There is no agreed standard assessment of the minimum knowledge and skills that are required to provide healthcare to participants in individual or team sports. This study aims to develop a syllabus for the Faculty of Sport and Exercise Medicine (FSEM) Team Care Diploma examination. This will provide a recognised assessment of the minimum required skills and knowledge for healthcare professionals providing care in an individual and team sport environment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Anthropogenic noise is a pollutant of global concern. While the effects of underwater noise pollution have been frequently studied in fish and mammals, our understanding of how this anthropogenic stressor affects marine reptiles is scant. Using a multichannel data logger equipped with a camera and hydrophone, we quantified behavioural responses of a free-ranging green turtle (Chelonia mydas) to vessel noise in the Galapagos Archipelago, an important nesting site in the eastern Pacific.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to analyze how certain characteristics of pars interarticularis fractures in elite athletes, as observed through T1-VIBE and STIR MRI, relate to the healing process and which anatomical factors might influence recovery.
  • A review of MRI data from 31 athletes over three years revealed various healing outcomes: 15% worsened, 23% remained stable, 43% partially healed, and 19% completely healed, with quick recovery times seen in chronic cases.
  • Findings suggest that normalization of T1-VIBE signal might indicate healing, while higher bone marrow edema signals were associated with worse fracture conditions, indicating an active healing phase; smaller, more vertical fractures were linked to improved healing outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Marine renewables could form a significant part of the green energy mix. However, a potential environmental impact of tidal energy converters (TECs) is collision risk between a device and animal, which has been a significant barrier in the consenting process. While it is important to understand the number of collisions of an animal with the device, the relative speed at which an animal collides with the device, and the point on the animal where collision occurs, will determine whether a collision is fatal, which is important in understanding population-level impacts.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Catch-and-release (C&R) angling is often touted as a sustainable form of ecotourism, yet the fine-scale behaviour and physiological responses of released fish is often unknown, especially for hard-to-study large pelagic species like Atlantic bluefin tuna (ABFT; ). Multi-channel sensors were deployed and recovered from 10 ABFTs in a simulated recreational C&R event off the west coast of Ireland. Data were recorded from 6 to 25 hours, with one ABFT (tuna X) potentially suffering mortality minutes after release.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Essential fish habitats (EFHs) are critical for fish life-history events, including spawning, breeding, feeding or growth. This study provides evidence of EFHs for the critically endangered flapper skate (Dipturus intermedius) in the waters around the Orkney Isles, Scotland, based on citizen-science observation data. The habitats of potential egg-laying sites were parametrised as >20 m depth, with boulders or exposed bedrock, in moderate current flow (0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Sessile organisms such as macroalgae located in the intertidal and shallow subtidal zones are subject to a hydrodynamically diverse environment, controlling the variation of intraspecific morphology and distribution. Kelp forests experience both waves and/or currents, yet, how kelp blade material mechanically differs between these various hydrodynamic environments and what drives the variation in strength and extensibility are not fully understood. Here, the mechanical properties, cellular composition and blade tissue thickness of the meristematic region and distal tips of the kelp Laminaria digitata blades were quantified and compared between seasons and among three hydrodynamic environments: wave dominated, current dominated and a benign hydrodynamic environment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The marine renewable energy industry is expanding as countries strive to reach climate targets as set out in the Paris Agreement. For tidal energy devices, the potential risk for animals to collide with a device, particularly its moving parts such as rotor blades, is often a major barrier in the consenting process. Theoretical work surrounding collision risk has commonly made use of a formulaic modelling approach.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We are at a crossroads where many nation states, including the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK), are committing to increased electricity production from "green energy", of which tidal stream marine renewable energy is one such resource. However, many questions remain regarding the effects of tidal energy devices on marine wildlife, including seabirds, of which the UK has internationally important numbers. Guidelines are lacking on how best to use both well-established and novel survey methods to assess seabird use of tidal flow areas, leading to a data-rich but information poor (DRIP) situation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The kelp Laminaria digitata growing in the low intertidal region along energetic coastlines are exposed to a range of hydrodynamic environments. Macroalgae in the intertidal zone can experience both waves and currents independently, but it is unknown how they influence growth rate. Relative growth rate of the meristematic region and the entire blade of L.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Transatlantic stock mixing in basking sharks Cetorhinus maximus is supported by low genetic diversity in populations throughout the Atlantic Ocean. However, despite significant focus on the species' movements; >1500 individual sharks marked for recapture and >150 individuals equipped with remote tracking tags, only a single record of transatlantic movment has been previously recorded. Within this context, the seredipitous re-sighting of a female basking shark fitted with a satellite transmitter at Malin Head, Ireland 993 days later at Cape Cod, USA is noteworthy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Fish-jellyfish interactions are important factors contributing to fish stock success. Jellyfish can compete with fish for food resources, or feed on fish eggs and larvae, which works to reduce survivorship and recruitment of fish species. However, jellyfish also provide habitat and space for developing larval and juvenile fish which use their hosts as means of protection from predators and feeding opportunities, helping to reduce fish mortality and increase recruitment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The past 30 years have seen several paradigm shifts in our understanding of how ocean ecosystems function. Now recent technological advances add to an overwhelming body of evidence for another paradigm shift in terms of the role of gelatinous plankton (jellyfish) in marine food webs. Traditionally viewed as trophic dead ends, stable isotope analysis of predator tissues, animal-borne cameras, and DNA analysis of fecal and gut samples (metabarcoding) are all indicating that many taxa routinely consume jellyfish.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The fast swimming and associated breaching behaviour of endothermic mackerel sharks is well suited to the capture of agile prey. In contrast, the observed but rarely documented breaching capability of basking sharks is incongruous to their famously languid lifestyle as filter-feeding planktivores. Indeed, by analysing video footage and an animal-instrumented data logger, we found that basking sharks exhibit the same vertical velocity (approx.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

For teleost fishes, the relationship between morphometric traits can provide significant insight into species life history, however gathering such data for noncommercial species can prove challenging. Here, we use data collected opportunistically from fisheries bycatch and stranding events to assess growth scaling over orders of magnitude in the ocean sunfish (genus Mola). Intriguingly, the confidence intervals for the relationship between length and mass suggests that isometric scaling is likely, a growth pattern rarely observed in fishes owing to the scaling of supportive structures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Adult ocean sunfish are the heaviest living teleosts. They have no axial musculature or caudal fin. Propulsion is by unpaired dorsal and anal fins; a pseudocaudal fin ('clavus') acts as a rudder.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The redistribution of species has emerged as one of the most pervasive impacts of anthropogenic climate warming, and presents many societal challenges. Understanding how temperature regulates species distributions is particularly important for mobile marine fauna such as sharks given their seemingly rapid responses to warming, and the socio-political implications of human encounters with some dangerous species. The predictability of species distributions can potentially be improved by accounting for temperature's influence on performance, an elusive relationship for most large animals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

There is a pressing need to understand and optimize biological control so as to avoid over-reliance on the synthetic chemical pesticides that can damage environmental and human health. This study focused on interactions between a novel biocontrol-strain, Bacillus sp. JC12GB43, and potato-pathogenic Phytophthora and Fusarium species.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Jellyfish are highly topical within studies of pelagic food-webs and there is a growing realisation that their role is more complex than once thought. Efforts being made to include jellyfish within fisheries and ecosystem models are an important step forward, but our present understanding of their underlying trophic ecology can lead to their oversimplification in these models. Gelatinous zooplankton represent a polyphyletic assemblage spanning >2,000 species that inhabit coastal seas to the deep-ocean and employ a wide variety of foraging strategies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Archaea and Bacteria constitute a majority of life systems on Earth but have long been considered inferior to Eukarya in terms of solute tolerance. Whereas the most halophilic prokaryotes are known for an ability to multiply at saturated NaCl (water activity (a(w)) 0.755) some xerophilic fungi can germinate, usually at high-sugar concentrations, at values as low as 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Many species are currently experiencing anthropogenically driven environmental changes. Among these changes, increasing noise levels are specifically a problem for species using acoustic signals (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF