At lunchtime on Friday, with the click of a mouse on Google Street View, the entire world will be able to see what lies beneath the surface of 10 of Sydney's most iconic marine locations.
But I have thought of that curious dugong many times in the past few weeks because, exactly a decade after the Western Australian government comprehensively protected Ningaloo, the future of Australia's north western waters and numerous other marine locations are again at a crossroads.
All of the surviving families of crocodyliforms inhabited freshwater and terrestrial environments except for the Dyrosauridae, which lived in freshwater and marine locations.
Studying the microbial communities in offshore deep marine locations has always been difficult and demanding.
Our analysis of 79,090 nitrogenase (nifH) PCR amplicons encoding 7,468 unique proteins from surface samples (ten DNA samples and two RNA samples) collected at ten marine locations world-wide provides the first in-depth survey of a functional bacterial gene and yield insights into the composition and diversity of the nifH gene pool in marine waters.
Similar observations have been reported for other marine locations, particularly when transitioning from oxic to anoxic conditions [9].
Despite the diversity of sample types and relatively small sample size, the marine locations were still largely distinguished from one another along PC2.
However, the different marine locations demonstrate differences in the relative abundance of RNR classes, and only the Arctic and the Sargasso Sea contain class Ib genes.
Three classes of type B4 plasmid (47 63 kb) have been found, with one class apparently dominant in marine locations, and another class dominant in European terrestrial environments.
A total of 21 locations were sampled, nine in continental rivers and lakes (CRL), two in rivers from Chiloé Island (CI) and ten marine locations in the fjords and channels (SFC).
