the Old Norse wordlōmr, which means “to moan.”) Loons feed mainly onfishes,crustaceans, andinsects. Thenestis usually a heap of vegetation at the water’s edge, in which two (or, rarely, three) olive-brown spottedeggsare laid. The parents share the task of incubation. The chicks...
Fish are not a true monophyletic taxon: rather, the term "fish" includes members of at least five separate lineages that diverged early in vertebrate evolution. The fishes are extremely diverse both in numbers of species and in their physiological adaptations to different environments. This ...
Adaptationsof form and function presumably determine distribution. The legs and jaws of some nymphs are modified for burrowing in silt or sand, whereas in other species, these are flattened tofacilitateentering narrow crevices or clinging to bottom materials in swift currents. Long, slender legs and...
and others). The great density of water enables very tiny aquatic animals (plankton), which are capable only of weak active movements, to maintain themselves in water by using simple adaptations in the form of minute air bubbles, or fat droplets in their body, or long, thin processes that ...
Specific adaptations to the aquatic environment (e.g., respiratory mechanisms, swimming appendages) may also be useful to distinguish aquatic from nonaquatic species; however, such adaptations are not always identified nor are all adaptations consistently visible (Jäch and Li, 1998). Most aquatic ...
There are over 10,000 known species worldwide the majority of which forms marine plankton. Copepods are numerically dominant in their environment and very diverse in their morphology and physiological adaptations. Hence, they play a pivotal role in aquatic ecosystems through grazing on microscopic ...
formation of polar ice sheets2. Over time, penguins evolved the suite of morphological, physiological, and behavioral features that make them arguably the most uniquely specialized of all extant birds. These adaptations have allowed penguins to colonize some of the most extreme environments on Earth....
The adaptive zone constitutes a complex of environmental conditions that underlie the adaptations of a given species across its geographic range of habitats (Simpson1944). Salinity tolerance is one of the most important adaptations that limits a given AIS’ distribution (Smyth and Elliott2016), which...
Before cetaceans evolved aquatic adaptations, they had a fully differentiated set of teeth (heterodont dentition), including incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. As the animals became more adapted to aquatic locomotion and lost the ability to manipulate food with their forelimbs, they started ...
Adverse outcomes of malformations, including skeletal abnormalities, cardiac edema, yolk sac edema, and ocular abnormalities, were observed in the experiment, suggesting disturbances in energetic homeostasis and visual effects, and that adaptations of wild spawning larvae were more affected than those of ...