Marine Biology Commons^™

Effects Of Shoreline Development And Freshwater Discharge On Nekton Assemblage And Trophic Structure In A Northern Gulf Of Mexico Estuary, Glenn Schumacher

Master's Theses

Coastal salt marshes support a diversity of nekton and facilitate critical ecosystem functions but are threatened by shoreline development and climate change. Therefore, coastal ecosystem managers have begun incentivizing the use of living shorelines (LS), erosion control structures incorporating native plantings, to mitigate ecological consequences of marsh loss. However, post-restoration climate changes may shift habitat templates and negate positive effects of ecosystem restoration. I evaluated the ecology nekton along LS, natural marshes, hardened shorelines and greyed shorelines within Biloxi Bay, Mississippi, during a high freshwater discharge (HFD) period by comparing nekton assemblage (using species richness, Shannon-Wiener diversity, and relative abundance), …

Induced Spawning Of Captive Tripletail Lobotes Surinamensis, Nicholas Adams

Master's Theses

The Tripletail, Lobotes surinamensis, is an emerging candidate species for U.S. marine aquaculture. This work aimed to address two bottlenecks for hatchery production of the species by developing a hormonal induction protocol to obtain fertile spawns from captive brooders and a method for sex identification of candidate brooders.

Single pairs selected among a captive-held broodstock conditioned under a natural photothermal cycle were induced with one of five treatments (n = 5 or 6 replicates per treatment). Control (no hormone) and hCG (1,100 IU.kg^-1 for females, 550 IU.kg^-1 for males) pairs did not spawn. Pairs treated with GnRHa …

Using Deep Learning And Uav Imagery To Detect Elkhorn Coral In St. Croix’S East End Marine Park, Samuel Wyatt

Master's Theses

Elkhorn coral, or Acropora palmata, is an important reef building species that promotes species abundance and other ecological services to the communities in the US Virgin Islands. We captured high resolution imagery of a reef in St. Croix’s East End Marine Park using a Wingtra One UAV. We then used deep learning techniques to detect individual coral colonies. We compared two deep learning models, FasterRCNN and MaskRCNN, and found that the models achieved accuracy shores up to 0.78. These scores improved when examining only larger corals in shallow waters. The model was able to both detect Elkhorn coral and …

Effects Of Intertidal Position On The Capacity For Anaerobic Metabolism And Thermal Stress Response In The Common Acorn Barnacle, Balanus Glandula, Kyra Anderson

Master's Theses

Intertidal habitats are characterized by dynamic, tidally-driven fluctuations in abiotic and biotic factors. Many of the environmental stressors that vary across the intertidal (e.g., temperature, oxygen, food availability, predation pressure) are strong drivers of metabolic rate in ectotherms. As such, we predicted that there may be pronounced differences in the metabolic and stress physiology of conspecific sessile invertebrates occupying at different relative tidal heights. The common acorn barnacle Balanus glandula represents an ideal model organism in which to investigate the possibility of tidal height-dependent physiological differences, owing to their wide distribution in the intertidal zone and their eurytolerant nature. In …