- Industry: Government
- Number of terms: 30456
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NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce
Any dive where the scuba diver is exposed to a higher pressure than when the dive began. Decompression occurs as the diver ascends.
Industry:Natural environment
Describes an organism which gains its nourishment from a large variety of foods.
Industry:Natural environment
In genetics, a DNA or RNA sequence that is labelled or marked with a radioactive isotope. It is used to detect the presence of a complementary sequence by hybridization with a nucleic acid sample.
Industry:Natural environment
Referring to the side of an island or reef that faces away from the prevailing wind.
Industry:Natural environment
The basic unit of coral skeletal microstructure. A center of calcification from which bundles of acicular aragonite crystals radiate outward; the hard integument of Crustacea.
Industry:Natural environment
Underground water that is generally found in the pore space of rocks or sediments and that can be collected with wells, tunnels, or drainage galleries, or that flows naturally to the earth's surface via seeps or springs. The term is not applied to water that is percolating or held in the top layers of the soil, but to that water in the zone of saturation below the water table.
Industry:Natural environment
A coral disease characterized by complete coral tissue degradation of Caribbean acroporid corals.-Two species of Acroporidae are affected, the elkhorn coral, Acropora palmata, and the staghorn coral, A. Cervicornis. The disease exhibits a sharp demarcation between apparently healthy coral tissue and exposed coral skeleton.- These signs are identical to plague, except that white band is acroporid specific (and plague has not been found on acroporids).- Tissue loss usually proceeds- from the base of the colony branch to the tip, although it can begin in the middle of a branch in A. Cervicornis. White band disease affects acroporid corals throughout the Caribbean and has decimated populations at a regional scale.The infective agent has not yet been isolated. For more information and illustrations, see: http://www.coral.noaa.gov/coral_disease/white_band.shtml.
Industry:Natural environment
A haploid spore in the red algae life cycle which is the meiotic product of the tetrasporangium of a diploid tetrasporophyte. The tetraspores are released, settle, and grow into gametophytes.
Industry:Natural environment
