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The port fouling fauna from Mexico has recieved greater study in the last 15 years. By improving our knowledge of fouling invertebrates on artificial substrates on the Southern Pacific coast of Mexico, we can better understand their distribution and prevent bioinvasions. The specimens listed in this present study come from PVC plates that were placed between June 2019 to June 2020 submerged at 1 m depth, on four docks of the Chahué Marina, Oaxaca, Mexico. Forty-four taxa, representing nine phyla were identi-fied: Sipuncula (1 species), Entoprocta (1), Bryozoa (3), Arthropoda (3), Porifera (4), Cnidaria (5), Chordata (6), Mollusca (10) and Annelida (11). Thirty taxa were identified to species, with two still requiring confirmation. Five were identified to genus, two to family, and five to class level. From the 30 identified species, 18 were non-native species: one entoproct, one mollusk, two bryozoans, three hydrozoans, three barnacles, four polychaetes, and four ascidians. These results include seven new records from the state of Oaxaca: one entoproct, one barnacle, two bryozoans, and three hydrozoans.

The littoral zone (including estuarine environments) is considered here as a regulator of the iron flow between the land and the marine environment, observed through the Jurassic sediments of Boulonnais (Northernmost France). Certain stages of deposition during the Kimmeridgian were accompanied by synsedimentary fault movements that caused sand injections, either in sands undergoing lithification (transforming into sandstone), or in claystone levels. The early cemented sandy material and that being hosted in a low-permeability environment (claystones) were as if frozen in their diagenetic evolution and protected against most subsequent transformations. We can see there early trapped and preserved iron-bearing authigenic minerals: pyrite, glauconite and magnetite. Glauconite can take on unusual forms: bryozoan colonies epigenized into glauconite, endolithic filaments mimicking microbial structures, a film enveloping a pyrite polyframboid. All these unusual forms, as well as the majority of glauconite grains, were not preserved in sands that were not cemented or protected early on, and the iron in these minerals was released into the surrounding environment during later stages of diagenesis. Generalizing from this example, the littoral environment can be an early iron trap, favoring the formation of iron-bearing minerals that would then tend to disappear during diagenesis, releasing iron into the marine environment. Furthermore, early cemented objects, where porosity/permeability was therefore rapidly occluded, are valuable insofar as they can record diagenetic stages that are subsequently no longer traced. This is the case here for iron-bearing minerals and this is an opportunity to question the highlighting of the role of microbial activity in the formation of glauconite.

In the middle Sandbian and lower Katian (Upper Ordovician) rocks of the Barrandian area, the fossil remains of conulariids are relatively abundant. Their thecae were sometimes used as solid surfaces for the attachment of epizoans, mostly craniid brachiopods of the genus Petrocrania, more rarely also echinoderms Hemicystites and Agelacrinites, and bryozoans Ceramopora and Spatiopora. The orientation of shells of Petrocrania suggests that conulariids (mostly belonging to the genus Archaeconularia) were dead at the time of the brachiopod attachment, their thecae were partly fragmentary and secondarily replaced. A find of Pseudoconularia grandissima attached to the theca of the cystoid Codiacystis is also reported.

Inflammation is a defense mechanism of the body in response to harmful stimuli such as pathogens, damaged cells, toxic compounds or radiation. However, chronic inflammation plays an important role in the pathogenesis of a variety of diseases. Multiple anti-inflammatory drugs are currently available for the treatment of inflammation, but all exhibit less efficacy. This drives the search for new anti-inflammatory compounds focusing on natural resources. Marine organisms produce a broad spectrum of bioactive compounds with anti-inflammatory activities. Several are considered as lead compounds for development into drugs. Anti-inflammatory compounds have been extracted from algae, corals, seaweeds and other marine organisms. We previously reviewed anti-inflammatory compounds, as well as crude extracts isolated from echinoderms such as sea cucumbers, sea urchins and starfish. In the present review, we evaluate the anti-inflammatory effects of compounds from other marine organisms, including macroalgae (seaweeds), marine angiosperms (seagrasses), medusozoa (jellyfish), bryozoans (moss animals), mollusks (shellfish) and peanut worms. We also present a review of the molecular mechanisms of the anti-inflammatory activity of these compounds. Our objective in this review is to provide an overview of the current state of research on anti-inflammatory compounds from marine sources and the prospects for their translation into novel anti-inflammatory drugs.

Cope’s Rule describes increasing body size in evolutionary lineages through geological time. This pattern has been documented in unitary organisms but does it also apply to module size in colonial organisms? We address this question using 1169 cheilostome bryozoans ranging through the entire 150 million years of their evolutionary history. The temporal pattern evident in cheilostomes as a whole shows no overall change in zooid (module) size. However, individual subclades show size increases: within a genus, younger species often have larger zooids than older species. Analyses of (paleo) latitudinal shifts show that this pattern cannot be explained by latitudinal effects (Bergmann’s Rule) coupled with younger species occupying higher latitudes than older species (an “out of the tropics” hypothesis). While it is plausible that size increase was linked to the advantages of large zooids in feeding, competition for trophic resources and living space, other proposed mechanisms for Cope’s Rule in unitary organisms are either inapplicable to cheilostome zooid size or cannot be evaluated. Patterns and mechanisms in colonial organisms cannot and should not be extrapolated from the better-studied unitary organisms. And even if macroevolution simply comprises repeated rounds of microevolution, evolutionary processes occurring within lineages are not always detectable from macroevolutionary patterns.

Two sediment sections are investigated at Cape Arkhangelos, island of Rhodes, where Pleistocene marine sediments crop out in horsts and grabens of a Mesozoic basement. There, hemipelagic sediments characterized by upper bathyal communities are atypically mixed with much shallower faunal components because they were deposited close to rugged coastal landforms. Biostratigraphic analyses show that the sections were deposited between 1.8 and 0.9 Ma, and between 1.8 and 1.6 Ma, respectively. By combining the planktonic/benthic foraminiferal ratio with 31 bathymetric indicators chosen among extant species of benthic foraminifera, mollusks, and bryozoans, we show that relative sea-level fluctuations can be reconstructed in these atypical settings despite the proximity of steep slopes that favored transportation of allochthonous fauna. The shallow-water components (including gravels and calcareous algae) were transported downslope by the combined action of gravity, currents, and tectonic disturbance that promoted drowning (with a maximum flooding recorded at ca. 1.7 Ma) and then uplift of fault-bounded paleovalleys that formed during the Early Pleistocene. Abrupt facies changes and age differences between sections have been triggered by the irregular paleotopography of the Mesozoic basement, which fostered differential depositional settings, with outer to middle neritic deposits above the horsts and upper bathyal deposits in paleovalleys.

Ecological interactions affect the survival and reproduction of individuals. However, ecological interactions are notoriously difficult to measure in extinct populations, hindering our understanding of how the outcomes of interactions such as competition vary in time and influence long-term evolutionary changes. Here, the outcomes of spatial competition in a temporally continuous community over evolutionary timescales are presented for the first time. Our research domain is encrusting cheilostome bryozoans from the Wanganui Basin of New Zealand over a ca 2 Myr time period (Pleistocene to Recent). We find that a subset of species can be identified as consistent winners, and others as consistent losers, in the sense that they win or lose interspecific competitive encounters statistically more often than the null hypothesis of 50%. Most species do not improve or worsen in their competitive abilities through the 2 Myr period, but a minority of species are winners in some intervals and losers in others. We found that conspecifics tend to cluster spatially and interact more often than expected under a null hypothesis: most of these are stand-off interactions where the two colonies involved stopped growing at edges of encounter. Counterintuitively, competitive ability has no bearing on ecological dominance.

Background Bryozoans are mostly sessile aquatic colonial invertebrates belonging to the clade Lophotrochozoa, which unites many protostome bilaterian phyla such as molluscs, annelids and brachiopods. While Hox and ParaHox genes have been extensively studied in various lophotrochozoan lineages, investigations on Hox and ParaHox gene complements in bryozoans are scarce. Results Herein, we present the most comprehensive survey of Hox and ParaHox gene complements in bryozoans using four genomes and 35 transcriptomes representing all bryozoan clades: Cheilostomata, Ctenostomata, Cyclostomata and Phylactolaemata. Using similarity searches, phylogenetic analyses and detailed manual curation, we have identified five Hox genes in bryozoans ( pb , Dfd, Lox5, Lox4 and Post2 ) and one ParaHox gene ( Cdx ). Interestingly, we observed lineage-specific duplication of certain Hox and ParaHox genes ( Dfd, Lox5 and Cdx ) in some bryozoan lineages. Conclusions The bryozoan Hox cluster does not retain the ancestral lophotrochozoan condition but appears relatively simple (includes only five genes) and broken into two genomic regions, characterized by the loss and duplication of serval genes. Importantly, bryozoans share the lack of two Hox genes ( Post1 and Scr ) with their proposed sister-taxon, Phoronida, which suggests that those genes were missing in the most common ancestor of bryozoans and phoronids.

Polar ecosystems are bellwether indicators of climate change and offer insights into ecological resilience. In this study, we describe contrasting responses to an apparent regime shift of two very different benthic communities in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. We compared species-specific patterns of benthic invertebrate abundance and size between the west (low productivity) and east (higher productivity) sides of McMurdo Sound across multiple decades (1960s–2010) to depths of 60 m. We present possible factors associated with the observed changes. A massive and unprecedented shift in sponge recruitment and growth on artificial substrata observed between the 1980s and 2010 contrasts with lack of dramatic sponge settlement and growth on natural substrata, emphasizing poorly understood sponge recruitment biology. We present observations of changes in populations of sponges, bryozoans, bivalves, and deposit-feeding invertebrates in the natural communities on both sides of the sound. Scientific data for Antarctic benthic ecosystems are scant, but we gather multiple lines of evidence to examine possible processes in regional-scale oceanography during the eight years in which the sea ice did not clear out of the southern portion of McMurdo Sound. We suggest that large icebergs blocked currents and advected plankton, allowed thicker multi-year ice, and reduced light to the benthos. This, in addition to a possible increase in iron released from rapidly melting glaciers, fundamentally shifted the quantity and quality of primary production in McMurdo Sound. A hypothesized shift from large to small food particles is consistent with increased recruitment and growth of sponges on artificial substrata, filter-feeding polychaetes, and some bryozoans, as well as reduced populations of bivalves and crinoids that favor large particles, and echinoderms Sterechinus neumayeri and Odontaster validus that predominantly feed on benthic diatoms and large phytoplankton mats that drape the seafloor after spring blooms. This response of different guilds of filter feeders to a hypothesized shift from large to small phytoplankton points to the enormous need for and potential value of holistic monitoring programs, particularly in pristine ecosystems, that could yield both fundamental ecological insights and knowledge that can be applied to critical conservation concerns as climate change continues.

The Lower Cretaceous bryozoan assemblage in the environs of Gunib village in Dagestan is described for the first time. The studied section is located in the zone of development of the Gapshima Formation (Hauterivian) deposits. The bryozoan assemblage is characterized by high taxonomic diversity and includes 32 taxa from four suborders of order Cyclostomata: Tubuliporina (24 taxa), Cancellata (1 taxon), Articulina (1 taxon), and Cerioporina (6 taxa). Because of the poor preservation of the colonies, most taxa are defined in open nomenclature. Therefore, the true diversity of cyclostomes in the study area is not fully recognized. The assemblage includes the taxa which are similar to bryozoans previously described from different levels from Valanginian to Barremian of Switzerland and France and, partly, from the lower Hauterivian of Germany ( Mecynoecia icaunensis (d’Orbigny), Mesenteripora marginata (d’Orbigny), M. reticulata (d’Orbigny), Poriceata ardescensis Walter, Apsendesia neocomiensis d’Orbigny, Diplocava biformis (Roemer), “ Heteropora ” arborea Koch et Dunker, and Elea periallos Taylor). The main difference of the Gunib assemblage from the Valanginian–Hauterivian assemblage of Switzerland and France and the lower Hauterivian assemblage of Germany is the presence of bryozoans from the family Eleidae, but it differs from the Barremian assemblage of France in the absence of Cheilostomata representatives. Among the studied cyclostomes, bryozoans with vertically growing colonies predominate. Some of these bryozoans are bilateral leaf-shaped, while others had thin cylindrical branches. Reticulate and massive colonies are rare, while encrusting bryozoans, which grow over erect colonies, are quite numerous.