Counts at Kittiwake Colonies

What’s at the Antenna Counts

Information transfer at evening bat colonies

Four lines of evidence indicate that evening bats, Nycticeius humeralis, at nursery colonies in northern Missouri transfer information by following each other to feeding and roosting sites . (1) Daily estimates of insect density from five automated suction traps showed that common prey in evening bat faecal samples, small beetles and flies, occur in rich patches that persist for several days . ...

Combining stable isotope analyses and geolocation to reveal kittiwake migration

Determining migratory strategies of seabirds is still a major challenge due to their relative inaccessibility. Small geolocators are improving this knowledge, but not all birds can be tracked. Stable isotope ratios in feathers can help us to understand migration, but we still have insufficient baseline knowledge for linking feather signatures to movements amongst distinct water masses. To under...

Video Monitoring of Honey Bee Colonies at the Hive Entrance

The flight activity of a honey bee colony is an important indicator of its strength and condition. We propose the use of video sensing to monitor arrivals and departures at the hive entrance. We describe the challenges of tracking and counting bees visually in the uncontrolled outdoor environment of an apiary, and detail a hardware platform and software algorithms we have developed to meet many...

PM-colonies

A colony is meant to be a symbol manipulating system consisting of as simple as possible components which behave in a cooperative way such that the collective competence is stricty larger than the component competences. We introduce here colonies whose agents can only perform point mutation (hence the abbreviation PM) transformations of the common string (which represents the environment of the...