The Northern Adriatic Ecosystem Deep Time in a Shallow Sea

About this book

The northern Adriatic Sea is transient, depending on the stage of the glacial cycle. Its present iteration has only existed for a few thousand years, yet it hosts a range of bottom-dwelling sea life ecologically resembling communities that existed 500 million years ago.

During the early twentieth century, life at the bottom of the Adriatic was systematically sampled from the east to the west coasts, revealing the most common animals and their distribution. In this book Frank McKinney combines these findings with more recent, local studies to better understand the ecological structure of the Adriatic's floor. Specifically, he uses the predation, sediment textures, and deposition rates, currents, and nutrients of northern Adriatic bottom communities to evaluate hypotheses concerning the conditions that drove surface-dwelling animals to seek long-term refuge within the sediments of the sea floor.

Customer Reviews

Biography