• Title/Summary/Keyword: tropical seagrass

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Feeding Habits of Trumpeter Whiting, Sillago maculata in the Tropical Seagrass Beds of Cockle Bay, Queensland (열대성 해초지에 서식하는 Sillago maculata의 식성)

  • Kwak, Seok-Nam;David, W. Klumpp;Huh, Sung-Hoi
    • Korean Journal of Ichthyology
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    • v.13 no.4
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    • pp.223-229
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    • 2001
  • Feeding habits of juvenile Sillago maculata, collected from the tropical seagrass beds in Cockle Bay, Queensland, were studied. S. maculata (0.5~9.5 cm SL) was a carnivore which consumed mainly gammarid amphipods, crabs and copepods. Its diets included small quantities of polychaetes, shrimps, fishes, isopods and cumacean. S. maculata showed ontogenetic changes in feeding habits. Small individuals preyed mainly on copepods, crab larvae and gammarid amphipods. While the portion of the stomach contents attributable to polychaetes, crabs and fishes increased with increasing fish size, consumption of copepods and crab larvae decreased progressively. Gammarid amphipods were the most selected prey item for all size classes.

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Landscapes and Ecosystems of Tropical Limestone: Case Study of the Cat Ba Islands, Vietnam

  • Van, Quan Nguyen;Duc, Thanh Tran;Van, Huy Dinh
    • Journal of Ecology and Environment
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    • v.33 no.1
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    • pp.23-36
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    • 2010
  • The Cat Ba Islands in Hai Phong City, northern Vietnam, consist of a large limestone island with a maximum height of 322 m above sea level and 366 small limestone islets with a total area of about $180\;km^2$. The islands are relicts of karst limestone mountains that became submerged during the Holocene transgression 7000 - 8000 year ago. The combination of the longtime karst process and recent marine processes in the monsoonal tropical zone has created a very diversity landscape on the Cat Ba Islands that can be divided into 3 habitat types with 16 forms. The first habitat type is the karst mountains and hills, including karst mountains and hills, karst valleys and dolines, karst lakes, karst caves, and old marine terraces. The second habitat type is the limestone island coast, including beaches, mangrove marshes, tidal flats, rocky coasts, marine notch caves, marine karst lakes, and bights. The third habitat type is karst plains submerged by the sea, including karst cones (fengcong) and towers (fengling), bedrock exposed on the seabed, sandy mud seabed, and submerged channels. Like the landscape, the biodiversity is also high in ecosystems composed of scrub cover - bare hills, rainy tropical forests, paddy fields and gardens, swamps, caves, beaches, mangrove forests, tidal flats, rocky coasts, marine krast lakes, coral reefs, hard bottoms, seagrass beds and soft bottoms. The ecosystems on the Cat Ba Islands that support very high species biodiversity include tropical evergreen rainforests, soft bottoms; coral reefs, mangrove forests, and marine karst lakes. A total of 2,380 species have been recorded in the Cat Ba Islands, included 741 species of terrestrial plants; 282 species of terrestrial animals; 30 species of mangrove plants; 287 species of phytoplankton; 79 species of seaweed; 79 species of zooplankton; 196 species of marine fishes; 154 species of corals; and 538 species of zoobenthos. Many of these species are listed in the Red Book of Vietnam as endangered species, included the white-headed or Cat Ba langur (Trachypithecus poliocephalus), a famous endemic species. Human activities have resulted in significantly changes to the landscape end ecosytems of the Cat Ba islands; however, many natural aspects of the islandsd have been preserved. For this reason, the Cat Ba Islands were recognized as a Biological Reserved Area by UNESCO in 2004.