David K A Barnes

..Although the poles may be protected from invasion by freezing sea surface temperatures, these may be under threat as the fastest-warming areas anywhere are at these latitudes...

..Our knowledge now touches every sea but so does our legacy of lost and discarded plastic...

..However, the environmental consequences of such microscopic debris are still poorly understood...

..Here, we describe the potential for benthic organisms to respond to disturbance, focusing particularly on what we know now that we did not a decade ago...

..This relationship seems robust to taxonomic and environmental variability. Competitors do not need to be as distant as birds and bees for complete asymmetry, a different family seems sufficient...

..Hermit crabs are useful to humans as fishing bait, pets and living wasted disposal systems, and so useful to other animals that they may even be hijacked...

..Clearly, spatial competition involves more than a simple mechanical "showdown."..

..Certainly, ocean surface energy increases with latitude through wind and wave action (and ice scour in polar regions)...

..The complexity of the Southern Ocean food web and the nonlinear nature of many interactions mean that predictions based on short-term studies of a small number of species are likely to be misleading...

..Modern molecular methods have also recently been incorporated into many traditional areas of polar biology. Environmental predictability dictates many of the biological characters seen in all of these areas of Antarctic research...

..Climate warming seems likely to increase iceloading of near shore polar waters, so that some of the world's most intensely disturbed faunas may soon suffer even more disturbance...

..However, experimental manipulation can provide molecular markers for identifying stress in Antarctic molluscs, provided it is accompanied by environmental validation, as demonstrated here...

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..Extreme diversity in metabolic strategy may explain the bryozoan long evolutionary record and great success in shallow marine environments worldwide...

..Being isolated and difficult of access, there are large areas which have never been sampled or even visited, and much of the biology is very poorly known away from the proximity of research stations...