Anthropogenic activities have posed many threats to the oceans and marine life. Understanding how individuals are affected and physiologically respond to these threats is crucial and allows for management and conservation applications. I evaluated the overall health condition of a subpopulation of gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) along the Oregon coast,...
The rare earth elements (REEs) have been established as powerful tracers for a range of physiochemical processes occurring in the natural environment. They also hold significant economic importance as many technological advancements are reliant upon the REEs for their unique magnetic, luminescent, and electrochemical characteristics. In sedimentary settings, understanding the...
The distribution of mobile marine predators often reflects underlying dynamic ecological processes. The geographical focus of this PhD is the South Taranaki Bight (STB) of New Zealand, where wind-driven coastal upwelling generates productivity and prey to support a blue whale foraging ground. The STB is also New Zealand’s most industrial...
Quantifying the mass transport through marine sediments, and the geochemical response to such flow with numerical models has become a common and powerful approach for geochemical data interpretation. In this dissertation, I developed and applied transport-reaction models to unravel complex and interdependent reactions involving carbon, sulfur and silica transformations in...
Clostridium perfringens is the causative agent of a wide variety of diseases in animals and humans. C. perfringens can produce more than 15 toxins. However, individual strains produce a subset of these toxins. Although a small percentage of C. perfringens isolates (mostly belonging to type A) produce C. perfringens enterotoxin...
Chitosan has been proposed as a "natural" coagulating agent to solve wastewater problems. The main hindrance in this commercial chitosan application has been its low cost effectiveness. The hypothesis in our research is that chitosan complexes with natural polyanions is more effective than chitosan alone, particularly in recovering low concentration...
The lag phase, the specific growth rate, the minimum a [subscript w]
required for growth and the temperature characteristic of
Fsendomonas fluorescens, Brochothrix thermosphacta, Salmonella
typhlmurium, Streptococcus faecalis and, Staphylococcus aureus
have been studied in liquid model media under controlled temperature
and a [subscript w] conditions. The results show that...
Soluble surimi wash water (SWW) proteins could be recovered using chitosan (Chi) complexed with alginate (Chi-Alg) generating co-products for feed formulations. Chi with a degree of deacetylation (DD) of 84% complexed with Alg at a mixing ratio (MR) of 0.2 was used to study Chi-Alg concentration and treatment time protein...
About 48 million cases of Foodborne illnesses (FBIs) are estimated to occur every year in the US. These are diseases caused by contamination of foods with bacteria, viruses, protozoa, parasites and toxic chemicals. Clostridium difficile infections (CDIs) are an important health-care and community associated problem. Since C. difficile spores have...