Tolerance of sponge assemblages to temperature anomalies: resilience and proliferation of sponges following the 1997-8 El-Niño southern oscillation.

Coral reefs across the world are under threat from a range of stressors, and while there has been considerable focus on the impacts of these stressors on corals, far less is known about their effect on other reef organisms. The 1997-8 El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) had notable and severe impacts on coral reefs worldwide, but not all reef organisms were negatively impacted by this large-scale event. Here we describe how the sponge fauna at Bahia, Brazil was influenced by the 1997-8 ENSO event. Sponge assemblages from three contrasting reef habitats (reef tops, walls and shallow banks) at four sites were assessed annually from 1995 to 2011. The within-habitat sponge diversity did not vary significantly across the study period; however, there was a significant increase in density in all habitats. Multivariate analyses revealed no significant difference in sponge assemblage composition (ANOSIM) between pre- and post-ENSO years for any of the habitats, suggesting that neither the 1997-8 nor any subsequent smaller ENSO events have had any measurable impact on the reef sponge assemblage. Importantly, this is in marked contrast to the results previously reported for a suite of other taxa (including corals, echinoderms, bryozoans, and ascidians), which all suffered mass mortalities as a result of the ENSO event. Our results suggest that of all reef taxa, sponges have the potential to be resilient to large-scale thermal stress events and we hypothesize that sponges might be less affected by projected increases in sea surface temperature compared to other major groups of reef organisms

Measurement of the forward-backward asymmetry of electron and muon pair-production in pp collisions at s ? =7

This paper presents measurements from the ATLAS experiment of the forward-backward asymmetry in the reaction pp -> Z/gamma* -> l(+)l(-), with l being electrons or muons, and the extraction of the effective weak mixing angle. The results are based on the full set of data collected in 2011 in pp collisions at the LHC at root s = 7 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.8 fb(-1). The measured asymmetry values are found to be in agreement with the corresponding Standard Model predictions. The combination of the muon and electron channels yields a value of the effective weak mixing angle of sin(2) theta(lept)(eff) = 0.2308 +/- 0.0005(stat.)+/- 0.0006(syst.)+/- 0.0009(PDF), where the first uncertainty corresponds to data statistics, the second to s ystematic effects and the third to knowledge of the parton density functions. This result agrees with the current world average from the Particle Data Group fit