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Copyright of Fisheries is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Atmosphere - Ocean (Canadian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society) is the property of Canadian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The initial phase of a collaborative ambient monitoring program (AMP) for the Strait of Georgia (SoG) (Marine Environmental Research, in press.) has focused on the benthos, sedimentary regimes, organic and contaminant cycling in subtidal regions of the strait. As part of that project, we review the primarily subtidal benthic invertebrate faunal communities found in the SoG, with particular reference to habitats and sediment conditions. This topic has not been addressed in the primary literature for over 20 years. Benthic biota are the baseline sentinels of the influence of natural and anthropogenic inputs to sediments. They are also a fundamental component of the food chain at the seafloor, and their community ecology must be clearly understood in order to predict how anthropogenic activities and climate change will affect our coastal oceans. The purpose of this review is to provide context on habitats and biota in the SoG, and to highlight topics and geographic areas where our knowledge of the benthos is limited or lacking.

Using the coalescent process, DNA sequences of a sample of individuals can be used to study the phylogenetic history of the individuals. Under the infinitely-many-sites mutation model, the DNA sequence data can be summarized by the number of segregating sites (which is numerically equivalent to the number of mutations on the tree). A number of methods exist, including a recursive method presented in this paper, that obtain an estimate of the age of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA), given the number of mutations. This paper introduces a method for finding the ages of mutations, given the total number of mutations on the tree. While the result is not useful in estimating the age of a specific segregating site, it is useful in examining the underlying assumption of a relatively constant population over time. This utilization of the result is illustrated using DNA sequence data obtained from a sample of Amerindians of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribe.