Domenico D'Alelio

Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn | Stazione Zoologica · Integrative Marine Ecology

The advent of metabarcoding (metaB) in aquatic ecology has provided a huge amount of information on plankton biodiversity worldwide. However, the large datasets obtained with that approach are still partially explored, especially for what concerns the study of trophic interactions and food webs. In this study, we analysed a metaB time series from t...

Coastal phytoplankton present remarkable variability because of complex patterns and relationships of hydrological parameters at the land–sea interface. We analysed a time series of 917 phytoplankton samples collected in the period 1984–2010 at the coastal station LTER‐MC (Gulf of Naples, Mediterranean Sea) with the aims of determining: (i) whether...

Copepods represent the numerically dominant component of marine mesozooplankton. Characterizing their diversity in terms of species composition and functional traits is thus fundamental to understand how planktonic organisms interact and communities function. Different modalities of prey capture differently affect the role of copepod species in the...

Network analysis is employed in biodiversity studies to explore the possible ecological implications of taxa co-occurrences across time or space, but the conceptual robustness of this approach is still under debate. Herein, by focusing our attention on a marine pelagic community previously described by metabarcoding data gathered over a time-series...

Plankton is the basis of pelagic food webs and is essential in supporting marine biodiversity and thus socio-economic activities, such as fisheries and aquaculture. It is therefore important to investigate the structure and functionality of plankton communities to understand ecosystem processes. In the frame of the FEAMP-IISPA program, we conducted...

Pseudo-nitzschia is a widespread genus of marine pennate diatoms comprising 58 species of which 28 can produce the neurotoxin domoic acid, causative of Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning (ASP). Species of the genus are found in both oceanic and coastal waters where they can form large blooms. The timing and magnitude of blooms is generally described based...

Transitional waters (TWs), such as coastal lagoons, are bodies of surface water at the transition between saline and freshwater domains. These environments play a vital role in guaranteeing ecosystem services, including provision of food, protection against meteorological events, as anthropogenic carbon sinks, and in filtering of pollutants. Due to...

Plankton communities include both unicellular and multicellular organisms. An important unicellular component is represented by those protists (i.e., unicellular eukaryotes) that are non-strictly autotrophic organisms and consume bacteria and other protists. These organisms are an important link between primary producers and metazoans and are usual...

This paper presents major gaps and challenges for implementing the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) in the Mediterranean region. The authors make recommendations on the scientific knowledge needs and codesign actions identified during two consultations, part of the Decade preparatory-phase, framing them in the Medi...

The observation of marine systems and the acquisition of physical, chemical, biological, and ecological data have increasingly grown in the last century. Marine systems are undergoing multiple and overlapping impacts that menace ecological communities, but global change impacts on the ecosystem functioning are not easily assessable, for several rea...

The study of ecosystem services requires the integration of different observational points. This is particularly true in Water, as this element continuously cycles, increasing chances of interaction among services originating in different ecosystems. However, aquatic scientists historically approached the study of inland/freshwater and open/marine...

Pollutants alter marine systems, interfering with provisioning of ecosystem services; understanding their interaction with ecological communities is therefore critical to inform environmental management. Here we propose a joint interaction- and compositional-based analysis for ecological status assessment and apply it on the benthic communities of...

Phytoplankton play key roles in the oceans by regulating global biogeochemical cycles and production in marine food webs. Global warming is thought to affect phytoplankton production both directly, by impacting their photosynthetic metabolism, and indirectly by modifying the physical environment in which they grow. In this respect, the Bermuda Atla...

Here we present the concept of NEREA, the Naples Ecological REsearch for Augmented observatories, an integrated observatory with a modular, adaptive structure, characterised by two main modules, NEREA-mob and NEREA-fix. NEREA-mob is conceived as monthly sampling at a coastal station in the Gulf of Naples where the whole water column is sampled for...

Oxylipins are important signal transduction lipoxygenase-derived products of fatty acids that regulate a variety of physiological and pathological processes in plants and animals. In marine diatoms, these molecules can be highly bioactive, impacting zooplankton grazers, bacteria and other phytoplankton. However, the ultimate cause for oxylipin prod...

Species are characterized by physiological and behavioral plasticity, which is part of their response to environmental shifts. Nonetheless, the collective response of ecological communities to environmental shifts cannot be predicted from the simple sum of individual species responses, since co‐existing species are deeply entangled in interaction n...

The strong bond between natural systems and human development has been formalized in scientific terms with the birth of the Ecosystems Services, the benefit that people obtain from the ecosystems, interesting both terrestrial and aquatic field. In order to investigate the relation between aquatic ecosystems and the ecosystem services used by the di...

The archaeological sites of Hercolaneum and Oplontis are among the better preserved ancient Roman town destroyed by Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD. From these sites, we collected and analysed samples of microalgae and cyanobacteria stored at the ACUF collection (Algal Collection of University of Federico II) in Naples. The samplings were carried out on...

Despite the fundamental role they play in the aquatic environments and, as a cascade, in the provision of primary resources to human beings, the majority of the general public ignores phytoplankton existence, in our country. This communication gap stems from multiple causes, from the overall inadequacy of school programmes to the extremely weak, to...

Integrated coastal management (ICM) relies on the inclusion of economic issues within marine ecology. To assess the progress of this integration, we applied topic modelling and network analysis to explore the pertinent literature (583 Isi-WoS, and 5459 Scopus papers). We classified the topics of interest (i.e., concepts, approaches, and sectors) th...

Water issues represent an increasing societal challenge, since the 70% of Planet Earth is covered by water. The intensive use of the hydrosphere is changing the structure and functions of aquatic ecosystems and their ability to produce goods and services that are useful to humans. It is therefore necessary that the scientific community makes citize...

Topic analyses were performed over a large dataset of studies pertaining both marine ecology and economy to identify the most investigated fields and to map the relationships between them. Three main domains were identified, such as Management, Impacts and Conservation, with the first one being the most internally coherent. A significant segregatio...

An HF radar system has been operating in the Gulf of Naples (GoN - Southeastern Tyrrhenian Sea) since 2004. The system is a SeaSonde manufactured by CODAR Ocean Sensors Ltd. Three mono-static radar units working at about 25 Mhz ensure the surface current mapping over nearly the entire Gulf of Naples area. The grid resolution is 1 Km with a range of...

Plankton are a pivotal component of the diversity and functioning of coastal marine ecosystems. A long time-series of observations is the best tool to trace their patterns and variability over multiple scales, ultimately providing a sound foundation for assessing, modelling and predicting the effects of anthropogenic and natural environmental chang...

What is at stake for scientists when communicating ecology? This is the basic question tackled in this paper, that we explored through reflections about an initiative of informal communication of ecological research called "Cammini LTER": itineraries connecting a number of sites belonging to the Italian Long-Term Ecological Research network (LTER-I...

Species are embedded in a web of intricate trophic interactions. Understanding the functional role of species in food webs is of fundamental interests. This is related to food web position, so positional similarity may provide information about functional overlap. Defining and quantifying similar trophic functioning can be addressed in different wa...

Water issues represent an increasing societal challenge, since the 70% of Planet Earth is covered by water. The intensive use of the hydrosphere is changing the structure and functions of aquatic ecosystems and their ability to produce goods and services that are useful to humans. It is therefore necessary that the scientific community makes citize...

The functioning of natural communities is the cumulative outcome of multifaceted and intersecting ecological and evolutionary processes occurring at species level. Species are not stable entities but evolve in consequence of contingent factors including the relationships they establish with the environment and other co-occurring species. Studying e...

Salps (pelagic tunicates) are rarely observed in nature and trophic interactions involving them mainly rely on the inspection of stomach contents of their potential predators. Moreover, salps have soft bodies that are hardly identified in potential consumers. We involved recreational SCUBA-divers and photographers in collecting de visu evidence of...

Genetic diversity is what selection acts on, thus shaping the adaptive potential of populations. We studied micro-evolutionary patterns of the key planktonic diatom Pseudo-nitzschia multistriata at a long-term sampling site over 2 consecutive years by genotyping isolates with 22 microsatellite markers. We show that both sex and vegetative growth in...

This proof-of-concept study integrates the surface currents measured by high-frequency coastal radars with plankton time-series data collected at a fixed sampling point from the Mediterranean Sea (MareChiara Long Term Ecological Research site in the Gulf of Naples) to characterize the spatial origin of phytoplankton assemblages and to scrutinize th...

Diatoms are diploid eukaryotic microalgae, key-players in the ocean and are responsible for a large fraction of the global primary production. These unicellular microalgae have a unique life cycle characterized by progressive cell size reduction; the restitution of the large cell size is accomplished within the sexual phase. Here we summarize the a...

Plankton is a hugely diverse community including both unicellular and multicellular organisms, whose individual dimensions span over seven orders of magnitude. Plankton is a fundamental part of biogeochemical cycles and food-webs in aquatic systems. While knowledge has progressively accumulated at the level of single species and single trophic proc...

A planktonic food-web model including sixty-three functional nodes (representing auto- mixo- and heterotrophs) was developed to integrate most trophic diversity present in the plankton. The model was implemented in two variants - which we named ‘green’ and ‘blue’ - characterized by opposite amounts of phytoplankton biomass and representing, respect...

The internal organization of plankton communities plays a key role in biogeochemical cycles and functioning of aquatic ecosystems. In this study, the structure of a marine plankton community (including both unicellular and multicellular organisms) was inferred applying an ecological network approach to species abundances observed weekly at the Long...

Plastids are usually uni-parentally inherited and genetic recombination between these organelles is seldom observed. The genus Pseudo-nitzschia, a globally relevant marine diatom, features bi-parental plastid inheritance in the course of sexual reproduction. This observation inspired the recombination detection we pursued in this paper over a ~1,40...

The planktonic genus Planktothrix, as other cyanobacteria, shows signals of both homologous and nonhomologous recombination. However, the frequency of recombination and its effect on Planktothrix population structuring is unknown. We isolated 290 Planktothrix strains from seven neighboring lakes in the subalpine Italian region and analyzed these us...

The delineation of species boundaries in the potentially harmful cyanobacterium Planktothrix Anagnostidis et Komarek 1988 is particularly tangled. Genetic recombination has been invoked to explain the occurrence of overlapping biological traits among recognized species. Although horizontal gene transfer is shown as a driver of diversification in th...

While the widespread red filaments of Planktothrix rubescens are considered a typical cyanobacterium of the deep lakes of the subalpine district (Central Europe), we report a massive occurrence of unexpected Planktothrix specimens in Lake Idro (Northern Italy). Many strains isolated from water samples that were collected during two sampling campaig...

Summary1. The genus Planktothrix (Cyanobacteria) usually produces concentrated populations of filaments in the summer metalimnion of thermally stratifying lakes. This has been associated with the action of gas vesicles, cellular structures providing positive buoyancy. At the end of the summer, filaments are carried by convective mixing deeper into...

Complexity pervades biological systems at any scale: from microbes to higher organisms, from individuals to populations, from communities to ecosystems. The degree of organization of plant and animal populations, their trophic relationships, and ecological associations is currently explored in ecology. Biodiversity and community structure are stron...

Whereas it is accepted that the population dynamics of higher organisms is strongly grounded in life history processes, such as the time taken to mature and reproduce, regulation in the abundance of aquatic protists is generally attributed to proximate properties of the environment in which they grow. We used 10 yr of data from the Gulf of Naples t...

The planktonic diatom Pseudo-nitzschia multistriata (Takano) Takano is known to produce the toxin domoic acid and it is recorded during late summer and autumn in the Gulf of Naples (Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy). We describe the sexual cycle of this species and report information on the variability of growth and cell size reduction rates at different expe...

The planktonic diatom Pseudo-nitzschia multistriata is a potentially toxic species recorded during late summer-autumn in the Gulf of Naples (Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy). We analysed the genetic structure by amplifying the internal transcribed spacer (ITS-1-5.8S-ITS-2) region of the ribosomal DNA of 44 strains isolated along 2 years. Polymorphism in the...

A total number of 40 potentially toxic microalgae and 5 taxa causing discolorations have been identified along the coasts of the Campania region (South Tyrrhenian Sea, Mediterranean Sea). This number is based on results of over 20 years of research at a coastal station in the Gulf of Naples, 4 years of monitoring activity along the Campania coasts...

Pseudo-nitzschia delicatissima (Cleve) Heiden is a very common pennate planktonic diatom found in temperate marine waters, where it is often responsible for blooms. Recently, three distinct internal transcribed spacer types have been recorded during a P. delicatissima bloom in the Gulf of Naples (Mediterranean Sea, Italy), which suggests the existe...