The effects of temperature and pH on the reproductive ecology of sand dollars and sea urchins: Impacts on sperm swimming and fertilization.

In an era of climate change, impacts on the marine environment include warming and ocean acidification. These effects can be amplified in shallow coastal regions where conditions often fluctuate widely. This type of environmental variation is potentially important for many nearshore species that are broadcast spawners, releasing eggs and sperm into the water column for fertilization.

The effect of water temperature and velocity on barnacle growth: Quantifying the impact of multiple environmental stressors.

Organisms employ a wide array of physiological and behavioral responses in an effort to endure stressful environmental conditions. For many marine invertebrates, physiological and/or behavioral performance is dependent on physical conditions in the fluid environment. Although factors such as water temperature and velocity can elicit changes in respiration and feeding, the manner in which these processes integrate to shape growth remains unclear.

The effect of water temperature and flow on respiration in barnacles: patterns of mass transfer versus kinetic limitation.

In aquatic systems, physiological processes such as respiration, photosynthesis and calcification are potentially limited by the exchange of dissolved materials between organisms and their environment. The nature and extent of physiological limitation is, therefore, likely to be dependent on environmental conditions. Here, we assessed the metabolic sensitivity of barnacles under a range of water temperatures and velocities, two factors that influence their distribution.

Estimating 3D movements from 2D observations using a continuous model of helical swimming.

Helical swimming is among the most common movement behaviors in a wide range of microorganisms, and these movements have direct impacts on distributions, aggregations, encounter rates with prey, and many other fundamental ecological processes. Microscopy and video technology enable the automated acquisition of large amounts of tracking data; however, these data are typically two-dimensional. The difficulty of quantifying the third movement component complicates understanding of the biomechanical causes and ecological consequences of helical swimming.

Non-linear advection-diffusion equations approximate swarming but not schooling populations.

Advection-diffusion equations (ADEs) are concise and tractable mathematical descriptions of population distributions used widely to address spatial problems in applied and theoretical ecology. We assessed the potential of non-linear ADEs to approximate over very large time and space scales the spatial distributions resulting from social behaviors such as swarming and schooling, in which populations are subdivided into many groups of variable size, velocity and directional persistence. We developed a simple numerical scheme to estimate coefficients in non-linear ADEs from individual-based model (IBM) simulations.