Coastal squeeze on temperate reefs: Long-term shifts in salinity, water quality, and oyster-associated communities

Foundation species, such as mangroves, saltmarshes, kelps, seagrasses, and oysters, thrive within suitable environmental envelopes as narrow ribbons along the land–sea margin. Therefore, these habitat-forming species and resident fauna are sensitive to modified environmental gradients. For oysters, many estuaries impacted by sea-level rise, channelization, and municipal infrastructure are experiencing saltwater intrusion and water-quality degradation that may alter reef distributions, functions, and services. To explore decadal-scale oyster–reef community patterns across a temperate estuary in response to environmental change, we resampled reefs in the Newport River Estuary (NRE) during 2013–2015 that had previously been studied during 1955–1956. We also coalesced historical NRE reef distribution (1880s–2015), salinity (1913–2015), and water-quality-driven shellfish closure boundary (1970s–2015) data to document environmental trends that could influence reef ecology and service delivery. Over the last 60–120 years, the entire NRE has shifted toward higher salinities. Consequently, oyster–reef communities have become less distinct across the estuary, manifest by 20%–27% lower species turnover and decreased faunal richness among NRE reefs in the 2010s relative to the 1950s. During the 2010s, NRE oyster–reef communities tended to cluster around a euhaline, intertidal-reef type more so than during the 1950s. This followed faunal expansions farther up estuary and biological degradation of subtidal reefs as NRE conditions became more marine and favorable for aggressive, reef-destroying taxa. In addition to these biological shifts, the area of suitable bottom on which subtidal reefs persist (contracting due to up-estuary intrusion of marine waters) and support human harvest (driven by water quality, eroding from up-estuary) has decreased by >75% since the natural history of NRE reefs was first explored. This “coastal squeeze” on harvestable subtidal oysters (reduced from a 4.5-km to a 0.75-km envelope along the NRE's main axis) will likely have consequences regarding the economic incentives for future oyster conservation, as well as the suite of services delivered by remaining shellfish reefs (e.g., biodiversity maintenance, seafood supply). More broadly, these findings exemplify how “squeeze” may be a pervasive concern for biogenic habitats along terrestrial or marine ecotones during an era of intense global change

Expressivity in children's drawings of themselves for adult audiences with varied authority and familiarity

This study investigated whether children’s expressive drawings of themselves vary as a function of audience authority and familiarity. One hundred and seventy-five children, 85 boys and 90 girls, aged between 8 years 1 months and 9 years 2 months (M= 8 years 5 months) were allocated into seven groups; a reference group (n=25) where no audience was specified, and six audience groups (n=25 per group) varying by audience type (policeman vs. teacher vs. man) and familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar). They drew baseline then happy and sad drawings of themselves, rated affect towards drawings type, and rated perceived audience authority. Audience familiarity and authority impacted expressive drawing strategy use and this varied by gender. There was higher overall expressive strategy use for happy drawings and for girls, and influences of affect type, familiarity and authority were found. The implications of children’s perceptions of audience type on their expressive drawings are discussed

Genotoxic potential of Cotinus coggygria Scop. (Anacardiaceae) stem extract in vivo

The intention was to evaluate the possible in vivo genotoxic potential in different cell-types, of a methanol extract obtained from the plant stem of Cotinus coggygria Scop., using the sex-linked recessive lethal (or SLRL) test and alkaline comet assay. The SLRL test, revealed the genotoxic effect of this extract in postmeiotic and premeiotic germ-cell lines. The comet assay was carried out on rat liver and bone marrow at 24 and 72 h after intraperitoneal administration. For genotoxic evaluation, three concentrations of the extract were tested, viz., 500, 1000 and 2000 mg/kg body weight (bw), based on the solubility limit of the extract in saline. Comet tail moment and total scores in the group treated with 500 mg/kg bw, 24 and 72 h after treatment, were not significantly different from the control group, whereas in the groups of animals, under the same conditions, but with 1000 and 2000 mg/kg bw of the extract, scores were statistically so. A slight decrease in the comet score and tail moment observed in all the doses in the 72 h treatment, gave to understand that DNA damage induced by Cotinus coggygria extract decreased with time. The results of both tests revealed the genotoxic effect of Cotinus coggygria under our experimental conditions

Molecular responses of European flounder (Platichthys flesus) chronically exposed to contaminated estuarine sediments

Molecular responses to acute toxicant exposure can be effective biomarkers, however responses to chronic exposure are less well characterised. The aim of this study was to determine chronic molecular responses to environmental mixtures in a controlled laboratory setting, free from the additional variability encountered with environmental sampling of wild organisms. Flounder fish were exposed in mesocosms for seven months to a contaminated estuarine sediment made by mixing material from the Forth (high organics) and Tyne (high metals and tributyltin) estuaries (FT) or a reference sediment from the Ythan estuary (Y). Chemical analyses demonstrated that FT sediment contained significantly higher concentrations of key environmental pollutants (including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), chlorinated biphenyls and heavy metals) than Y sediment, but that chronically exposed flounder showed a lack of differential accumulation of contaminants, including heavy metals. Biliary 1-hydroxypyrene concentration and erythrocyte DNA damage increased in FT-exposed fish. Transcriptomic and 1H NMR metabolomic analyses of liver tissues detected small but statistically significant alterations between fish exposed to different sediments. These highlighted perturbance of immune response and apoptotic pathways, but there was a lack of response from traditional biomarker genes. Gene-chemical association annotation enrichment analyses suggested that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were a major class of toxicants affecting the molecular responses of the exposed fish. This demonstrated that molecular responses of sentinel organisms can be detected after chronic mixed toxicant exposure and that these can be informative of key components of the mixture

Firsthand Experience and The Subsequent Role of Reflected Knowledge in Cultivating Trust in Global Collaboration

While scholars contend that firsthand experience - time spent onsite observing the people, places, and norms of a distant locale - is crucial in globally distributed collaboration, how such experience actually affects interpersonal dynamics is poorly understood. Based on 47 semistructured interviews and 140 survey responses in a global chemical company, this paper explores the effects of firsthand experience on intersite trust. We find firsthand experience leads not just to direct knowledge of the other, but also knowledge of the self as seen through the eyes of the other - what we call “reflected knowledge”. Reflected and direct knowledge, in turn, affect trust through identification, adaptation, and reduced misunderstandings

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead