Digital Commons Network^™

A Comparison Of Site Fidelity And Habitat Use Of Red Snapper (Lutjanus Campechanus) To Evaluate The Performance Of Two Artificial Reefs In South Texas Utilizing Acoustic Telemetry, Andres Garcia

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Evaluation of artificial reefs is becoming an increasingly important component of fisheries management. This is particularly true for the northwestern Gulf of Mexico where natural hard substrate is limited and 359 petroleum platforms are scheduled for removal in 2013 due to the “idle iron” policy. This study compared the performance of two artificial reef configurations off the south Texas coast, the Texas Clipper and South Padre Island Near Shore Reefs that differ in material, depth, and distance from shore, with respect to behavior of red snapper, Lutjanus campechanus, an important recreational and commercial species. Red snapper were implanted with depth …

Phytoplankton Community Distribution And Light Absorption Properties In The Northern Gulf Of Mexico, Sumit Chakraborty

Dissertations

The theme of this dissertation was to understand the spatio-temporal dynamics of the phytoplankton community, its light absorption properties, and its relationship to underlying physicochemical processes. Understanding these phenomena will benefit efforts to predict pathways of carbon transformation in the ocean, to estimate primary productivity (PP) and to characterize distributions of phytoplankton communities using ocean color remote sensing.

This research entailed four different studies, which address different objectives. The first two studies dealt with phytoplankton community composition and its relationship to environmental variables. A chemotaxonomic approach was used, which was successful in revealing distinct phytoplankton assemblages in distinct water mass …

Arthropod Density In A Fragmented Urban Landscape Along The Northern Coast Of The Gulf Of Mexico, Anna E. Williams

Honors Theses

Ecologists once focused their research on “pristine” habitats that were considered untouched by human activity. As urbanization rapidly increases, the concept of pristine habitats becomes obsolete. Urban habitats must be studied in order to understand the ecology of our increasingly developed society. Rapid urbanization greatly affects coastal habitats. Popular real estate, strip malls, casinos, and resorts all fragment urban landscapes. Much of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico is a fragmented urban landscape caused by rapid development. That same coastal landscape is ecologically important and includes habitats important to many different organisms, among them intercontinental migratory songbirds that …

Relative Survival Of Gags Mycteroperca Microlepis Released Within A Recreational Hook-And-Line Fishery: Application Of The Cox Regression Model To Control For Heterogeneity In A Large-Scale Mark-Recapture Study, Beverly J. Sauls

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The objectives of this study were to measure injuries and impairments directly observed from gags Mycteroperca microlepis caught and released within a large-scale recreational fishery, develop methods that may be used to rapidly assess the condition of reef fish discards, and estimate the total portion of discards in the fishery that suffer latent mortality. Fishery observers were placed on for-hire charter and headboat vessels operating in the Gulf of Mexico from June 2009 through December 2012 to directly observe reef fishes as they were caught by recreational anglers fishing with hook-and-line gear. Fish that were not retained by anglers were …