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.
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.
Sponges form symbioses with a wide array of mesofauna including polychaetes, crustaceans, brittle stars, and bivalves. These organisms use the sponge for food and shelter, but their effect on the sponge is largely unknown. The...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
This thesis examines the material and interpretive relations imbricated in the Longleaf Pine (Pinus palustris) forest as a cultural landscape. Approaching this landscape, I outline and demonstrate the utility of a neo-Sauerian...
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...
Drivers of animal movement, including abiotic factors such as environmental conditions or climate and biotic factors such as species interactions and reproduction, are classic topics in ecology and relevant to both basic and applied...
Wetlands are transitional ecosystems between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. They are among the most productive and diverse ecosystems and make a critical part of larger ecosystems. Functional wetlands provide numerous significant...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 effect of changing anthropogenic mercury emissions on marine wildlife is of broad interest. Methylmercury can cause reproductive and neurological damage and biomagnifies in food webs. Mercury availability in the Pacific Ocean has...
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...
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, ...
Ecophysiology of Ectothermic Ecosystem Engineers: Bioenergetic Effects of Climate and Food on Dominant Consumers and Their Consequences for Coastal Ecosystems
This body of work explores dynamics of temperate marine grazers that are sensitive to food availability and inhabit regions with dramatic contemporary variation in abiotic conditions due to nearshore upwelling. Climate change projections...
This dissertation aims to present a more compelling and transformative religious-moral framework for environmental behavior. It specifically seeks to offer alternatives to prevalent Anglo-European, Christian approaches such as dominion, ...
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...
In the North Pacific, seamounts are important ecological hotspots for deep-sea species found below 200 m. Connectivity of deep-sea fauna in this area is of great interest to fisheries and conservation management for possible restoration...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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, ...
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...
Parrotfishes are nominal herbivores whose grazing is considered an important top-down control on benthic coral reef communities, maintaining cropped reef substrates that are conducive to the settlement and recruitment of coral larvae. As...
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...
The ecological and evolutionary factors influencing whether hermaphrodites inbreed or outbreed via self-fertilization or outcrossing has long been a theoretical and empirical focus. Recent theory predicts that the conditions favoring the...
Plants are host to a diverse array of non-pathogenic microbes including bacteria and fungi which may act as an "extended phenotype" that provides fitness benefits throughout the life cycle of the plant. These microbial communities...
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 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...
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...
Mature male African elephants are known to periodically enter a temporary state of heightened aggression called "musth, often linked with increased androgens, particularly testosterone. Sexually mature males are capable of entering...
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...
Salamanders are often the most abundant vertebrates in forest communities and perform important ecological functions by acting as both predators and prey. Their decline, extirpation, and potential extinction can have dramatic effects on...
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.
