David Salvatierra

Spanish National Research Council | CSIC · Instituto de Ciencias Marinas de Andalucía

Contamination is likely to affect the composition of an ecological landscape, leading to the rupture of ecological connectivity among habitats (ecological fragmentation), which may impact on the distribution, persistence and abundance of populations. In the current study, different scenarios within a spatially heterogeneous landscape were simulated...

Sampling of Atyaephyra desmarestii for ecotoxicology studies in the Guadalete River (Cádiz).

Aquatic ecotoxicity assays used to assess ecological risk assume that organisms living in a contaminated habitat are forcedly exposed to the contamination. This assumption neglects the ability of organisms to detect and avoid contamination by moving towards less disturbed habitats, as long as connectivity exists. In fluvial systems, many environmen...

The spatial distribution of the snail Olivella semistriata along the Ecuadorian coast near the city of Manta seems to be influenced by urban discharges. This observation leads us to hypothesize that contamination might determine inhabitable areas for the snails. Therefore, the ability of the snails to detect the local contamination and react by mov...

Habitat selection by fish is the outcome of a choice between different stimuli. Typically, the presence of food tends to attract organisms, while contamination triggers an avoidance response to prevent toxic effects. Given that both food and contaminants are not homogeneously distributed in the environment and that food can be available in contamin...

Fry of the marine fish Rachycentron canadum (cobia) and larvae of the estuarine shrimp Litopenaeus vannamei (whiteleg shrimp) were exposed to a copper gradient which ranged from 0.20 to 1.80 mg Cu/L for the experiments with cobia and from 0.10 to 1.0 mg Cu/L for the experiments with whiteleg shrimp. The experiments focused on the avoidance response...