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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Aquaponics is an integrated biological system that essentially combines a soil-less garden with an aquarium. It is important because it uses less water than commercial farming, is ecofriendly, and provides a local source of food for its...
Differences in behavior and physiology can arise and change because of variation in life history strategies or differences in discrete polymorphisms. These differences can result from the indirect effects of predation, or responses to...
Animals move through landscapes where their resources are unevenly and often patchily distributed. When animals move and choose among their scattered resources in predictable ways, ecologists may be able to anticipate the spatial...
Coral reef ecosystems provide essential goods and services to civilizations around theworld but are threatened by local and global anthropogenic disturbances. As we enter the United Nation’s Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable...
Natal dispersal, the period where an organism moves from its birthplace to the area where it settles and attempts to breed, may have significant consequences for individual fitness. Individuals vary in both the decision to initiate...
Herbarium specimens and the professionals who collect them can be powerful resources for understanding significant biological change, and many opportunities remain to improve specimen data analysis, collection, and exploration to...
Clonality is the general term that encompasses all manner of pinching, splitting, budding, and fragmenting behaviors by which organisms divide their somatic body tissues into more or less independent units. It can be as straight forward...
The system including the congeners C. maculatus and C. chinensis has long been a model for competition studies. Members of these two pest species often cohabit facilities designed for the storage of dried legumes, a crucial nutritional...
This poster session will use text, diagrams, and images to display the development of the application of The DCC Curation Lifecycle Model practices to preservation of Diatomscapes. Diatomscapes represents a collection of images of...
Climate change and its associated effects such as sea-level rise and increased temperature are critical concerns for salt marsh ecosystems. We have just begun to understand the effects of climate change on salt marsh plant communities, ...
Hagfishes (Myxinidae) are common in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). Two of the species found in the GOM are endemic to the area and potentially provide key ecosystem services (e.g. generate substrate turnover and recycling of...
Spiny lobsters (Family Palinuridae) are large, diverse, and abundant marine crustaceans, which have conquered tropical, subtropical, and temperate coastal waters around the globe despite strong predation pressure. The mechanisms and...
Understanding how environmental forces, genetic variation, and developmental process combine to mold adaptations remains a core challenge in evolutionary biology. Our research is answering this challenge. More specifically we focused on...
P 3 D - Publishing, Publicizing, & Preserving Diatomscapes Faculty institutional repositories (IR) participation contribution is successful when "What's in it for me?" is effectively conveyed to faculty while emphasizing minimal faculty...
The small golden ant Pheidole morrisi Forel is the most common ant of the Apalachicola National Forest, a typical longleaf pine flat-woods ecosystem and is found in pine forests across the eastern U.S. P. morrisi likely plays a...
Biocrusts have been shown to affect the ecological conditions in a variety of habitats, involving abiotic mechanisms such as soil moisture retention, nitrogen-rich biomass additions, changing soil physical properties, as well as direct...
The Florida Gulf of Mexico coast extends over both tropical and subtropical zones resulting in an intermingling of fauna typical to both zones. Cold winter water temperatures historically limited the distribution of many tropical species...
Anticipating the effects of anthropogenic global change on organisms is a major challenge for ecologists today. While there have been many studies on the independent effects of global change factors, few studies have considered the...
Despite their simple appearance sponges are extremely diverse and complicated in their interactions with other organisms, and they are extremely difficult to identify to species. Often sponges of the same genus or body shape have very...
Our knowledge of the reproductive dynamics of many economically important marine fish species is remarkably poor. This limits our ability to assess and manage the effects of exploitation on their reproductive potential. The Gulf Black...
Stress is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life. As such, there exists a great deal of variability in the individual response to stress, particularly as a functional cause of depression. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the...
Studying the relationships between plants and insects is important in natural and agricultural communities. It has been shown that plant community composition has an effect on insect pollinators and herbivores. However, these...
The homicide rate in Chicago nearly tripled between 1965 and 1992, and subsequently declined by more than 50% through 2005. But is this trend representative of all areas in the city? Drawing on the social disorganization and concentrated...
Non-random mating is presumed to be an important mechanism that allows for the maintenance of genetic variation. Assortative mating has been studied extensively in organisms that possess defined ways in which sperm is transferred to eggs...
Creatine kinase (CK) and arginine kinase (AK) are members of a highly conserved family of phosphoryl transferase enzymes known as phosphagen kinases. CK and AK play a central role in cells that display high and variable rates of ATP...
The Variability of Certain Life-History Parameters of Early Juvenile Gag Grouper (Mycteroperca Microlepis, Pisces: Serranidae) in the Northern Gulf of Mexico
Gag grouper, Mycteroperca microlepis, compose an important recreational and commercial fishery along the Gulf coast and Eastern Seaboard of the United States (Coleman et al. 2000, Morris et al. 2000, and Musick et al. 2000). Like many...
Understanding the evolution of cooperative behaviors is a major goal of evolutionary biology, but the majority of research in this field has focused on why helpers assist others. Helpers’ reproductive costs introduce a clear paradox to...
Mercury Isotopic Composition of Fish, Including Gag Grouper (Mycteroperca microlepis) and Red Snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) as Constraints of Mercury Cycling in the Northern Gulf of Mexico
Mercury is a naturally occurring, pervasive element in the environment, with many chemical forms. Toxicology, environmental cycling and retention, and production of mercury by industrial processes and natural and manufactured emissions...
The smalltooth sawfish (Pristis pectinata) is a critically endangered species endemic to the Atlantic Ocean. The only known viable populations have been found along the coast of Florida as well as in the coastal areas of the Bahamas. In...
The importance of predators in influencing community structure is a well-studied area of ecology. However, few studies apply ecological hypotheses of predation when studying multi-predator systems, and even fewer apply these theories to...
The Pine Barrens treefrog (Hyla andersonii) is restricted to three isolated (disjunct) regions in the eastern United States: New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and the Florida panhandle and southern Alabama. It is a seepage bog...
Ecosystem engineers can have complex effects on communities through a variety of direct and indirect pathways. Describing these effects is a necessary step in understanding and predicting the effects of engineer species. Red Grouper ...
Density, or the number of individuals per unit area, is known to have substantial effects on individual organisms and on populations. In particular, densities at small spatial scales often affect species interactions, e.g., predation and...
The effective conservation of threatened and endangered plants requires an understanding of population dynamics and the evaluation of factors that could reduce population growth. I constructed and analyzed a stage structured demographic...
Species interactions can regulate a population’s density and therefore can act as a selective force on that population. Such evolutionary responses have the potential to feedback and change ecological interactions between species. For...
We examined the influence of age, gender, Black vs. White ethnicity, and education on five indices of personality stability and change across an average interval of 8 years in the East Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area study. In the...
Determining the Influence of Abiotic Factors on Spatiotemporal Patterns of Marine Catfish (Family: Ariidae) within the Apalachicola Bay Estuarine System, Florida USA
Two species of marine catfishes (Ariopsis felis and Bagre marinus) are abundant within the Apalachicola Bay system during most of the year. They function as 2nd and 3rd order consumers and as prey for top predators. Males perform oral...
Despite being a known benthic biological hotspot and environmental ecotone, the DeSoto Canyon has hardly been characterized for its benthic diversity and community structure. Moreover, it is a known deposition and impact zone due to...
Foraging Ecology and Diet Selection of Juvenile Green Turtles (Chelonia mydas) in the Western Bahamas: Insights from Stable Isotope Analysis and Prey Mapping
Species’ foraging choices influences their somatic growth rates, age at maturity, and time spent in vulnerable early life stages. Thus, differences in population demographics are often attributed to variability either in diet type, ...
National character stereotypes are widely shared, but do not reflect assessed levels of personality traits. In this article we present data illustrating the divergence of stereotypes and assessed personality traits in north and south...
In food webs, which are composed of antagonistic species interactions (with negative component effects), predators frequently suppress herbivores and indirectly benefit plants via "trophic cascades". Yet, ecological webs commonly contain...
Two species of ariid catfish, Ariopsis felis and Bagre marinus, were sampled at various sites along the northwest coast of Florida. Stomach contents of each species were analyzed in order to understand the trophic ecology of these two...
The Atlantic Goliath Grouper, a large, long-lived reef fish in the southeastern United States, was fished to near extinction decades ago. It is now showing signs of recovery in Florida waters due to protection from fishing in state and...
Understanding how avian species richness relates to habitat structure, plant species richness, and seasonality is essential to improving management and conservation goals for declining bird species. During their annual cycle, birds...
Most mega-biodiverse countries have low to upper middle incomes (Fisher and Christopher 2007), resulting in a shortage of funding and expertise to implement conservation actions in these biodiversity hotspots. Creating conservation...
Many ecosystems depend on fire to maintain appropriate habitats and to trigger important life history events, such as flowering or seed germination. Historically, fires were often patchy, but due to fire suppression and other human...
A thorough understanding of the physiology of elasmobranchs (sharks, skates, and rays) is important from an applied aspect as most species are captured either directly or indirectly in commercial and recreational fisheries, or affected...
Coastal areas serve as vital habitat for many marine fishes. Estuaries are a type of coastal system in which freshwater input often drives broad gradients of environmental variables while transporting fluvial nutrient subsidies to marine...
Understanding the factors that influence a species' geographic range and the overlap between the ranges of distinct species remains a central question in both ecology and evolution. Here we investigate the influences of hybridization and...
Early-life experience can influence behaviors that are important for survival and reproduction, two key elements of individual fitness. However, identifying a mechanism linking early-life experience to late-life behavior is a major...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
