The sustainable development and environmental protection of the Arctic ecosystem is on the agenda globally. The Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals call for conserving at least 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas globally. Management tools to achieve this goal include marine protected areas (MPAs) and “other effective area-based conservation ...

Interest on the creation of sustainable value has recently increased as a response to global issues caused by traditional business-as-usual logic. Indeed, corporations pursuing profits and competitive advantage at the expense of social and environmental resources has become a source of pressing concern and institutionalized unsustainability needs to be reversed. To create sustainable value, a paradigm ...

Background: Mosquito-borne viruses pose a serious threat to humans worldwide. There has been an upsurge in the number of mosquito-borne viruses in Europe, mostly belonging to the families Togaviridae, genus Alphavirus (Sindbis, Chikungunya), Flaviviridae (West Nile, Usutu, Dengue), and Peribunyaviridae, genus Orthobunyavirus, California serogroup (Inkoo, Batai, Tahyna). The principal focus of this ...

The emergence of cercariae from infected mollusks is considered one of the most important adaptive strategies for maintaining the trematode life cycle. Short transmission opportunities of cercariae are often compensated by periodic daily rhythms in the cercarial release. However, there are virtually no data on the cercarial emergence of bird schistosomes from freshwater ecosystems in northern ...

This work summarizes ice algal studies, presented as biomass and species temporal and spatial distribution, during 11 cruises conducted between 1986 and 2012. The majority of the biomass was found as loosely attached sub-ice algal layers, and sampling required diving. A maximum of 40 mg chlorophyll m⁻² and 15.4 × 10⁹ cells m⁻² was measured in May. The species ...

Male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing structurally complex songs traditionally associated with low latitude breeding grounds. This vocal behaviour is increasingly reported outside these areas. All singers in a given population sing the same version of a song that is constantly evolving with modifications on different levels within the song structure. This study provides the first detailed ...

The rate of ocean-driven retreat of Greenland’s tidewater glaciers remains highly uncertain in predictions of future sea level rise, in part due to poorly constrained glacier-adjacent water properties. Icebergs and their meltwater contributions are likely important modifiers of fjord water properties, yet their effect is poorly understood. Here, we use a 3-D ocean circulation model, coupled to ...

Adjuvants are used to increase the strength, quality, and duration of the immune response of vaccines. Neutrophils are the first immune cells that arrive at the injection site and can release DNA fibers together with granular proteins, so-called neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), to entrap microbes in a sticky matrix of extracellular chromatin and microbicidal agents. Similar extracellular ...

Gear modifications in fisheries are usually implemented to obtain catch patterns that meet management objectives. In the Basque bottom trawl fishery, gear regulations include the use of a square mesh panel (SMP) placed at the top panel of the extension piece of the trawl to supplement diamond mesh codend selectivity. However, the catch patterns obtained with this combination have raised concern ...

Phenotypic polymorphism is a commonly observed phenomenon in nature, but extremely rare in free-living stages of parasites. We describe a unique case of somatic polymorphism in conspecific cercariae of the bird schistosome Trichobilharzia sp. “peregra”, in which two morphs, conspicuously different in their size, were released from a single Radix balthica snail. A detailed morphometric analysis ...