Weevils too tough to chew for safety

Sterilization - Tough on Germs, Tough on Plastics, too

electing the most appropriate plastic material for a medical device is no easy task. Designers must balance cost-containment pressures that favor using the least-expensive material and S processing techniques against the need to ensure the patients’ safety and wellbeing at any cost. Product liability also is a concern. So for any given application, the designer ends up specifying the most affor...

Always chew your food: freshwater stingrays use mastication to process tough insect prey.

Chewing, characterized by shearing jaw motions and high-crowned molar teeth, is considered an evolutionary innovation that spurred dietary diversification and evolutionary radiation of mammals. Complex prey-processing behaviours have been thought to be lacking in fishes and other vertebrates, despite the fact that many of these animals feed on tough prey, like insects or even grasses. We invest...

Frugivorous weevils are too rare to cause Janzen–Connell effects in New Guinea lowland rain forest

A community of frugivorous weevils was studied by quantitative rearing of 57 weevil species represented by 10 485 individuals from 326 woody plant species in lowland rain forest in Papua New Guinea. Only fruits from 35% of plant species were attacked by weevils. On average, weevils were reared from only 1 in 33 fruits and 1 kg of fruit was attacked by 2.51 individuals. Weevil host specificity w...

Tough times call for tough decisions.

To chew or not to chew: fecal particle size in herbivorous reptiles and mammals.

A major difference between reptile and mammalian herbivores is that the former do not masticate their food. Actually, food particle size reduction by chewing is usually considered one of the adaptations facilitating the higher metabolic rates of mammals. However, quantitative comparisons of ingesta particle size between the clades have, to our knowledge, not been performed so far. We measured m...