Tag Archives: shores

Huge waves measured for first time in Arctic Ocean

As the climate warms and sea ice retreats, the North is changing. An ice-covered expanse now has a season of increasingly open water that is predicted to extend across the whole Arctic Ocean before the middle of this century. Storms thus have the potential to create Arctic swell – huge waves that could add a new and unpredictable element to the region. (more…)

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Invasive crabs help Cape Cod marshes

Ecologists are wary of non-native species, but along the shores of Cape Cod where grass-eating crabs have been running amok and destroying the marsh, an invasion of a predatory green crabs has helped turn back the tide in favor of the grass. The counter-intuitive conclusions appear in a new paper in the journal Ecology.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Long vilified, invasive species can sometimes become an ecosystem asset. New Brown University research published online in the journal Ecology reports exactly such a situation in the distressed salt marshes of Cape Cod. There, the invasive green crab Carcinus maenas is helping to restore the marsh by driving away the Sesarma reticulatum crabs that have been depleting the marsh grasses. (more…)

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Confirmed: Stress Gradient Hypothesis: How Plant Communities Endure Stress

The Stress Gradient Hypothesis holds that as stress increases in an ecosystem, mutually supportive interactions become more significant and negative interactions, such as competition, become less so. The idea has been hotly debated but is now backed by a review of hundreds of studies co-authored in Ecology Letters by Mark Bertness, professor of biology at Brown, who first formally proposed the hypothesis in 1994. The time has come, he said, to test its application and predictive value.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Ecology is rife with predation, competition, and other dramatic “negative interactions,” but those alone do not determine the course life on Earth. Organisms sometimes benefit each other, too, and according to the Stress Gradient Hypothesis, their “positive interactions” become measurably more influential when ecosystems become threatened by conditions such as drought. Ecologists have argued about the hypothesis ever since Brown University ecologist Mark Bertness co-proposed it in 1994; Bertness says a large new global meta-analysis he co-authored in Ecology Letters definitively shows that it is true. (more…)

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