106 results match your criteria: "School of Marine and Environmental Affairs[Affiliation]"

Ocean acidification is occurring in conjunction with warming and deoxygenation as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Multistressor experiments are critically needed to better understand the sensitivity of marine organisms to these concurrent changes. Growth and survival responses to acidification have been documented for many marine species, but studies that explore underlying physiological mechanisms of carbon dioxide (CO) sensitivity are less common.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Prior research demonstrates widespread persistence of beliefs about climate change causes and risks that are arguably misconceptions. They include believing pollution causes climate change, believing ozone depletion causes climate change, the combination of these two "green beliefs," referred to as environmental problems, and believing natural climate variation significantly contributes to current climate trends. Each of these causal beliefs has the potential to weaken or divert support away from effective climate change risk mitigation policies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Urban areas are dynamic ecological systems defined by interdependent biological, physical, and social components. The emergent structure and heterogeneity of urban landscapes drives biotic outcomes in these areas, and such spatial patterns are often attributed to the unequal stratification of wealth and power in human societies. Despite these patterns, few studies have effectively considered structural inequalities as drivers of ecological and evolutionary outcomes and have instead focused on indicator variables such as neighborhood wealth.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Are long-term growth responses to elevated pCO2 sex-specific in fish?

PLoS One

September 2020

Department of Marine Sciences, University of Connecticut, Groton, CT, United States of America.

Whether marine fish will grow differently in future high pCO2 environments remains surprisingly uncertain. Long-term and whole-life cycle effects are particularly unknown, because such experiments are logistically challenging, space demanding, exclude long-lived species, and require controlled, restricted feeding regimes-otherwise increased consumption could mask potential growth effects. Here, we report on repeated, long-term, food-controlled experiments to rear large populations (>4,000 individuals total) of the experimental model and ecologically important forage fish Menidia menidia (Atlantic silverside) under contrasting temperature (17°, 24°, and 28°C) and pCO2 conditions (450 vs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The 2015 U.S. West Coast domoic acid event was caused by a massive harmful algal bloom (HAB) that consisted mostly of the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia australis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The human dimensions of harmful algal blooms (HABs) are becoming increasingly apparent as they grow in frequency and magnitude in some regions of the world under changing ocean conditions. One such region is the U.S.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Accurate, rapid, and comprehensive biodiversity assessments are critical for investigating ecological processes and supporting conservation efforts. Environmental DNA (eDNA) surveys show promise as a way to effectively characterize fine-scale patterns of community composition. We tested whether a single PCR survey of eDNA in seawater using a broad metazoan primer could identify differences in community composition between five adjacent habitats at 19 sites across a tropical Caribbean bay in Panama.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The indirect paths to cascading effects of extinctions in mutualistic networks.

Ecology

July 2020

Departamento de Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 05508-090, Brazil.

Biodiversity loss is a hallmark of our times, but predicting its consequences is challenging. Ecological interactions form complex networks with multiple direct and indirect paths through which the impacts of an extinction may propagate. Here we show that accounting for these multiple paths connecting species is necessary to predict how extinctions affect the integrity of ecological networks.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Seagrass beds provide a variety of ecosystem services, both within and outside the bounds of the habitat itself. Here we use environmental DNA (eDNA) amplicons to analyze a broad cross-section of taxa from ecological communities in and immediately surrounding eelgrass (). Sampling seawater along transects extending alongshore outward from eelgrass beds, we demonstrate that eDNA provides meter-scale resolution of communities in the field.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is in the final stages of negotiating an agreement to prohibit harmful fisheries subsidies, thereby achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14.6. An effective agreement should be viewed as an opportunity for nations to proactively transition towards sustainable and equitable fisheries and pave the path for other SDGs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis allows the simultaneous examination of organisms across multiple trophic levels and domains of life, providing critical information about the complex biotic interactions related to ecosystem change. Here we used multilocus amplicon sequencing of eDNA to survey biodiversity from an eighteen-month (2015-2016) time-series of seawater samples from Monterey Bay, California. The resulting dataset encompasses 663 taxonomic groups (at Family or higher taxonomic rank) ranging from microorganisms to mammals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Pacing Climate Precarity: Food, Care and Sovereignty in Iñupiaq Alaska.

Med Anthropol

January 2021

School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, Department of American Indian Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.

At what pace do storytellers represent climate change in the "rapidly changing" Arctic? Popular and scholarly narratives of Indigenous vulnerability too often address climate change as a singular event that reorganizes local lifeworlds in unprecedented ways. On the ground however, contemporary climate impacts, such as "food insecurity," are refracted through a range of simultaneous and cumulative ecological, social, and political structures that can precede and/or unfold slower than climate change. These factors include the intergenerational relations of care within communities, as well as multiple political challenges to their continuance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * Fish are a vital source of essential nutrients but are often overlooked; understanding their nutrient composition could help address food and nutrition security issues.
  • * The study reveals that specific environmental conditions and fish species characteristics influence nutrient levels, indicating that enhancing fish-based food strategies could greatly benefit populations with inadequate nutrient intake, particularly children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The structure of ecological interactions is commonly understood through analyses of interaction networks. However, these analyses may be sensitive to sampling biases with respect to both the interactors (the nodes of the network) and interactions (the links between nodes), because the detectability of species and their interactions is highly heterogeneous. These ecological and statistical issues directly affect ecologists' abilities to accurately construct ecological networks.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As environmental DNA (eDNA) studies have grown in popularity for use in ecological applications, it has become clear that their results differ in significant ways from those of traditional, non-PCR-based surveys. In general, eDNA studies that rely on amplicon sequencing may detect hundreds of species present in a sampled environment, but the resulting species composition can be idiosyncratic, reflecting species' true biomass abundances poorly or not at all. Here, we use a set of simulations to develop a mechanistic understanding of the processes leading to the kinds of results common in mixed-template PCR-based (metabarcoding) studies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Comparative Functional and Phylogenomic Analyses of Host Association in the Remoras (Echeneidae), a Family of Hitchhiking Fishes.

Integr Org Biol

May 2019

Museum of Natural Science, Ichthyology Section, Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA.

The family Echeneidae consists of eight species of marine fishes that hitchhike by adhering to a wide variety of vertebrate hosts via a sucking disc. While several studies have focused on the interrelationships of the echeneids and the adhesion performance of a single species, no clear phylogenetic hypothesis has emerged and the morphological basis of adhesion remains largely unknown. We first set out to resolve the interrelationships of the Echeneidae by taking a phylogenomic approach using ultraconserved elements.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Sustainability standards for seafood mainly address environmental performance criteria and are less concerned with the welfare of fisheries workers who produce the seafood. Yet human rights violations such as slavery and human trafficking are widespread in fisheries around the world, and underscore the need for certification bodies and other seafood supply chain actors to improve social performance, in addition to addressing environmental challenges. Calls for socially responsible seafood have referenced human rights law and policy frameworks to shape the guiding principles of socially responsible seafood and to provide the legal machinery to implement these aspirations, but practical guidance on how to achieve this is lacking.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Inhibition of ovarian development and instances of sex reversal in genotypic female sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) exposed to elevated water temperature.

Gen Comp Endocrinol

August 2019

Environmental and Fisheries Sciences Division, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2725 Montlake Blvd E, Seattle, WA 98112, USA; Center for Reproductive Biology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, USA. Electronic address:

This study determined high temperature effects on ovarian development in a marine groundfish species, sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria), with potential application in sex reversal or sterilization for aquaculture. Monosex female (XX-genotype) sablefish larvae (∼30 mm) were randomly divided into three groups and exposed to control (15.6 °C ± 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Economic and sociocultural impacts of fisheries closures in two fishing-dependent communities following the massive 2015 U.S. West Coast harmful algal bloom.

Harmful Algae

December 2018

Environmental and Fisheries Sciences Division, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2725 Montlake Blvd E, Seattle, WA 98112, USA. Electronic address:

In the spring of 2015, a massive harmful algal bloom (HAB) of the toxin-producing diatom Pseudo-nitzschia occurred on the U.S. West Coast, resulting in the largest recorded outbreak of the toxin domoic acid and causing fisheries closures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The patterns by which different nations share global fisheries influence outcomes for food security, trajectories of economic development, and competition between industrial and small-scale fishing. We report patterns of industrial fishing effort for vessels flagged to higher- and lower-income nations, in marine areas within and beyond national jurisdiction, using analyses of high-resolution fishing vessel activity data. These analyses reveal global dominance of industrial fishing by wealthy nations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A funder-imposed data publication requirement seldom inspired data sharing.

PLoS One

January 2019

National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.

Growth of the open science movement has drawn significant attention to data sharing and availability across the scientific community. In this study, we tested the ability to recover data collected under a particular funder-imposed requirement of public availability. We assessed overall data recovery success, tested whether characteristics of the data or data creator were indicators of recovery success, and identified hurdles to data recovery.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Counting the fish eaten rather than the fish caught.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

July 2018

CGIAR Research Program on Fish, WorldFish, 11960 Bayan Lepas, Penang, Malaysia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Will the California Current lose its nesting Tufted Puffins?

PeerJ

March 2018

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Olympia, WA, United States of America.

Tufted Puffin () populations have experienced dramatic declines since the mid-19th century along the southern portion of the species range, leading citizen groups to petition the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to list the species as endangered in the contiguous US. While there remains no consensus on the mechanisms driving these trends, population decreases in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem suggest climate-related factors, and in particular the indirect influence of sea-surface temperature on puffin prey. Here, we use three species distribution models (SDMs) to evaluate projected shifts in habitat suitable for Tufted Puffin nesting for the year 2050 under two future Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emission scenarios.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The effect of tides on nearshore environmental DNA.

PeerJ

March 2018

School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States of America.

We can recover genetic information from organisms of all kinds using environmental sampling. In recent years, sequencing this environmental DNA (eDNA) has become a tractable means of surveying many species using water, air, or soil samples. The technique is beginning to become a core tool for ecologists, environmental scientists, and biologists of many kinds, but the temporal resolution of eDNA sampling is often unclear, limiting the ecological interpretations of the resulting datasets.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF