Exposure to boat noise in the field yields minimal stress response in wild reef fish

Aquatic anthropogenic noise is on the rise, with growing concern about its impact on species that are sensitive to low-frequency sounds (e.g. most fish and invertebrates). We investigated whether the reef fish Halichoeres bivittatus living in both noisy and quiet areas had differing levels of baseline stress (measured as whole-body cortisol) and whether they would exhibit a physiological stress response when exposed to boat noise playbacks. While the playback experiments significantly increased cortisol levels in fish from our experiment compared to baseline levels, there were minimal pairwise differences across treatments and no difference in baseline stress for fish living in noisy vs. quiet areas. These results may be explained by low overall auditory sensitivity, habituation to a fairly noisy environment (due to biological sounds), or that boat noise simply may not represent an immediate threat to survival in this species. These findings contrast recent studies that have shown elevated stress responses in fishes when exposed to boat noise and highlights that inter-specific differences must be considered when evaluating potential impacts of anthropogenic noise on marine life

Exposure to boat noise in the field yields minimal stress response in wild reef fish

Aquatic anthropogenic noise is on the rise, with growing concern about its impact on species that are sensitive to low-frequency sounds (e.g. most fish and invertebrates). We investigated whether the reef fish Halichoeres bivittatus living in both noisy and quiet areas had differing levels of baseline stress (measured as whole-body cortisol) and whether they would exhibit a physiological stress response when exposed to boat noise playbacks. While the playback experiments significantly increased cortisol levels in fish from our experiment compared to baseline levels, there were minimal pairwise differences across treatments and no difference in baseline stress for fish living in noisy vs. quiet areas. These results may be explained by low overall auditory sensitivity, habituation to a fairly noisy environment (due to biological sounds), or that boat noise simply may not represent an immediate threat to survival in this species. These findings contrast recent studies that have shown elevated stress responses in fishes when exposed to boat noise and highlights that inter-specific differences must be considered when evaluating potential impacts of anthropogenic noise on marine life

Quality control for the first large areas of triple-GEM chambers for the CMS endcaps

The CMS Collaboration plans to equip the very forward muon system with triple-GEM detectors that can withstand the environment of the High-Luminosity LHC.This project is at the final stages of R&D and moving to production. A large area of several 100 m 2 are to be instrumented with GEM detectors which will be produced in six different sites around the world. A common construction and quality control procedure is required to ensure the performance of each detector.The quality control steps will include optical inspection,cleaning and baking of all materials and parts used to build the detector,leakage current tests of the GEM foils,high voltage tests,gas leak tests of the chambers and monitoring pressures time,gain calibration to know the optimal operation region of the detector,gain uniformity tests, and studying the efficiency,noise and tracking performance of the detectors in a cosmic stand using scintillator

Deep Herschel view of obscured star formation in the Bullet cluster

We use deep, five band (100–500 μm) data from the Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS) to fully constrain the obscured star formation rate, SFRFIR, of galaxies in the Bullet cluster (z = 0.296), and a smaller background system (z = 0.35) in the same field. Herschel detects 23 Bullet cluster members with a total SFRFIR = 144±14 yr-1. On average, the background system contains brighter far-infrared (FIR) galaxies, with ~50% higher SFRFIR (21 galaxies; 207± 9 yr-1). SFRs extrapolated from 24 μm flux via recent templates (SFR24 µm) agree well with SFRFIR for ~60% of the cluster galaxies. In the remaining ~40%, SFR24 µm underestimates SFRFIR due to a significant excess in observed S100/S24 (rest frame S75/S18) compared to templates of the same FIR luminosity

Distinct habitat types arise along a continuous hydrodynamic stress gradient due to interplay of competition and facilitation

Though species interactions across local environmental gradients are well studied, the way in which species interactions shift between different habitats on a landscape scale has received less attention. We hypothesised that interactions among a suite of shoreline plant species shift across a hydrodynamic-exposure gradient, leading to generation of apparently distinct habitat types (e.g. bare cobble beaches, vegetated cobble beaches, fringing marshes and salt marshes). We examined hydrodynamic forcing and found that it was strongly correlated with shoreline habitat type. A transplant experiment revealed that all plants were rapidly crushed and abraded in bare cobble areas with high hydrodynamic energy and were out-competed by grasses in the low-energy salt marshes. Vegetated cobble beaches are inhabited by the largest amount of plant species under intermediate conditions, where hydrodynamic energy is sufficiently low to allow the establishment of the ecosystem engineer Spartina and sufficiently high to prevent the monopolisation of space by competitively dominant, but stress intolerant grasses. Experimentally reducing physical and biotic stresses (hydrodynamics and interspecific competition) on bare cobble beaches and salt marshes, respectively, enabled forbs to persist across the whole gradient. These results demonstrate that the outcome of interspecific interactions at landscape scales is driven by background physical conditions, and that this can result in the development of what are considered distinct habitats.

Long-Distance Interactions Regulate the Structure and Resilience of Coastal Ecosystems

Mounting evidence indicates that spatial interactions are important in structuring coastal ecosystems. Until recently, however, most of this work has been focused on seemingly exceptional systems that are characterized by regular, self-organized patterns. In this review, we document that interactions that operate at long distances, beyond the direct neighborhood of individual organisms, are more common and have much more far-reaching implications for coastal ecosystems than was previously realized. We review studies from a variety of ecosystem types—including cobble beaches, mussel beds, coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and mangrove forests—that reveal a startling interplay of positive and negative interactions between habitats across distances of up to a kilometer. In addition to classical feeding relations, alterations of physical conditions constitute an important part of these long-distance interactions. This entanglement of habitats has crucial implications for how humans manage coastal ecosystems, and evaluations of anthropogenic impact should explicitly address long-distance and system-wide effects before we deem these human activities to be causing little harm

Discovery of ''Warm Dust'' Galaxies in Clusters at z \~ 0.3: Evidence for Stripping of Cool Dust in the Dense Environment?

Using far-infrared imaging from the "Herschel Lensing Survey", we derive dust properties of spectroscopically-confirmed cluster member galaxies within two massive systems at z~0.3: the merging Bullet Cluster and the more relaxed MS2137.3-2353. Most star-forming cluster sources (~90%) have characteristic dust temperatures similar to local field galaxies of comparable infrared (IR) luminosity (T_dust ~ 30K). Several sub-LIRG (L_IR < 10^11 L_sun) Bullet Cluster members are much warmer (T_dust > 37K) with far-infrared spectral energy distribution (SED) shapes resembling LIRG-type local templates. X-ray and mid-infrared data suggest that obscured active galactic nuclei do not contribute significantly to the infrared flux of these "warm dust" galaxies. Sources of comparable IR-luminosity and dust temperature are not observed in the relaxed cluster MS2137, although the significance is too low to speculate on an origin involving recent cluster merging. "Warm dust" galaxies are, however, statistically rarer in field samples (> 3sigma), indicating that the responsible mechanism may relate to the dense environment. The spatial distribution of these sources is similar to the whole far-infrared bright population, i.e. preferentially located in the cluster periphery, although the galaxy hosts tend towards lower stellar masses (M_* < 10^10 M_sun). We propose dust stripping and heating processes which could be responsible for the unusually warm characteristic dust temperatures. A normal star-forming galaxy would need 30-50% of its dust removed (preferentially stripped from the outer reaches, where dust is typically cooler) to recover a SED similar to a "warm dust" galaxy. These progenitors would not require a higher IR-luminosity or dust mass than the currently observed normal star-forming population.Comment: 25 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Data from: How habitat-modifying organisms structure the food web of two coastal ecosystems

The diversity and structure of ecosystems has been found to depend both on trophic interactions in food webs and on other species interactions such as habitat modification and mutualism that form non-trophic interaction networks. However, quantification of the dependencies between these two main interaction networks has remained elusive. In this study, we assessed how habitat-modifying organisms affect basic food web properties by conducting in-depth empirical investigations of two ecosystems: North American temperate fringing marshes and West African tropical seagrass meadows. Results reveal that habitat-modifying species, through non-trophic facilitation rather than their trophic role, enhance species richness across multiple trophic levels, increase the number of interactions per species (link density), but decrease the realized fraction of all possible links within the food web (connectance). Compared to the trophic role of the most highly connected species, we found this non-trophic effects to be more important for species richness and of more or similar importance for link density and connectance. Our findings demonstrate that food webs can be fundamentally shaped by interactions outside the trophic network, yet intrinsic to the species participating in it. Better integration of non-trophic interactions in food web analyses may therefore strongly contribute to their explanatory and predictive capacity