99 research outputs found
Long-term biological effects of petroleum residues on fiddler crabs in salt marshes
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Marine Pollution Bulletin 54 (2007): 955-962, doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2007.02.015.In September 1969,the Florida barge spilled 700,000 L of No. 2 fuel oil into the salt
marsh sediments of Wild Harbor (Buzzards Bay, MA). Today the aboveground
environment appears unaffected, but a substantial amount of moderately degraded petroleum
still remains 8 to 20 cm below the surface. The salt marsh fiddler crabs, Uca pugnax, which
burrow into the sediments at depths of 5 to 25 cm, are chronically exposed to the spilled oil.
Behavioral studies conducted with U. pugnax from Wild Harbor and a control site, Great
Sippewissett marsh, found that crabs exposed to the oil avoided burrowing into oiled layers,
suffered delayed escape responses, lowered feeding rates, and lower densities. The oil
residues are therefore biologically active and affect U. pugnax populations. Our results add new knowledge about long-term consequences of spilled oil, a dimension that should be included when assessing oil-impacted areas and developing management plans designed to
restore, rehabilitate, or replace impacted areas.This work was funded by a grant from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea
Grant Program, under grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
U.S. Department of Commerce, under Grant No. NA16RG2273, project no. R/P-73.
Additional support was provided by funding from the NSF funded Research Experience for
Undergraduates program, award 0453292, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator
Award (N00014-04-01-0029) to C. Reddy, and an USEPA Science to Achieve Results
Graduate Fellowship (FP91661801) to E. Peacock
Effect of field exposure to 38-year-old residual petroleum hydrocarbons on growth, condition index, and filtration rate of the ribbed mussel, Geukensia demissa
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Environmental Pollution 154 (2008): 312-319, doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2007.10.008.In September 1969, the Florida barge spilled 700,000 L of No. 2 fuel oil into the
salt marsh sediments of Wild Harbor, MA. Today a substantial amount, approximately
100 kg, of moderately degraded petroleum remains within the sediment and along
eroding creek banks. The ribbed mussels, Geukensia demissa, which inhabit the salt marsh creek bank, are exposed to the spilled oil. Examination of short-term exposure was
done with transplantation of G. demissa from a control site, Great Sippewissett marsh,
into Wild Harbor. We examined the effects of long-term exposure with transplantation of
mussels from Wild Harbor into Great Sippewissett. Both the short- and long-term
exposure transplants exhibited slower growth rates, shorter mean shell lengths, lower
condition indices, and decreased filtration rates. Our results add new knowledge about
long-term consequences of spilled oil, a dimension that should be included when
assessing oil-impacted areas and developing management plans designed to restore,
rehabilitate, or replace impacted areas.This work is the result of research sponsored by NOAA National Sea Grant
College Program Office, Department of Commerce, under Grant No. NA16RG2273,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant Project No. R/P-73. Additional support was
provided by funding from the NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates
program, award 0453292, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award
(N00014-04-01-0029) to C. Reddy
Collecting Psycholinguistic Response Time Data Using Amazon Mechanical Turk
Researchers in linguistics and related fields have recently begun exploiting online crowd-sourcing tools, like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), to gather behavioral data. While this method has been successfully validated for various offline measures--grammaticality judgment or other forced-choice tasks--its use for mainstream psycholinguistic research remains limited. This is because psycholinguistic effects are often dependent on relatively small differences in response times, and there remains some doubt as to whether precise timing measurements can be gathered over the web. Here we show that three classic psycholinguistic effects can in fact be replicated using AMT in combination with open-source software for gathering response times client-side. Specifically, we find reliable effects of subject definiteness, filler-gap dependency processing, and agreement attraction in self-paced reading tasks using approximately the same numbers of participants and/or trials as similar laboratory studies. Our results suggest that psycholinguists can and should be taking advantage of AMT and similar online crowd-sourcing marketplaces as a fast, low-resource alternative to traditional laboratory research
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