Re-occupation of existing nesting burrows in the European bee-eater Merops apiaster has only rarely - and if so mostly anecdotically - been documented in the literature record, although such behavior would substantially save time and energy. In this study, we quantify burrow re-occupation in a German colony over a period of eleven years and identify ecological variables determining reuse probab...

The monitoring of the mosquito population for the purpose of possible better mosquito control took place in Osijek from 1995-2004. For the period of ten years, the primary research method for monitoring the mosquitoes used was dry ice baited CDC-traps. This provided significant information on mosquito species, their dynamics and seasonal activity. In total, 207,136 mosquito specimens were colle...

Advances in next-generation sequencing offer high-throughput and cost-effective genotyping alternatives, including genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS). Results have shown that this methodology is efficient for genotyping a variety of species, including those with complex genomes. To assess the utility of GBS in cultivated hexaploid oat (Avena sativa L.), seven bi-parental mapping populations and div...

Highly charged ions (HCIs) are an important tool in various fields of basic and applied physical research. However, in many cases the species of interest cannot be produced directly by a primary ion source. Therefore, charge breeding, i.e. the conversion of singly charged ions to highly charged ions, is an essential part of projects such as nuclear or astrophysical experiments with post acceler...

G iven that roughly 95% of bird species are classified as 'monogamous' 1 , some might claim that the class Aves is short on mating system diversity. Whatever the group might lack in this respect, however, is offset by rather impressive species differences in the prevalence of covert matings by females. By a recent count 2 , extra-pair fertilization (EPF) rates range from 0 to 76% across avian s...

Distribution, population and reproductive biology of Uca sindensis were studied in a subtropical mangrove of Pohl port in the northern Persian Gulf. Sex ratio, distribution, population structure, handedness (evenness), diameter burrow, breeding season and fecundity were investigated. Ten 0.5 m2 quadrates were randomly sampled during low tide periods from October 2009 to September 2010.A total o...

The recognition of a second breeding season in some migratory bird species by Rohwer et al. (1) creates an interesting scenario for conserving migratory bird populations. Previously, conservation biologists assessed sources as large undisturbed habitats and sinks as degraded breeding grounds (2), and treated fragmented and deforested habitats in nonbreeding “wintering” areas as drains on the po...

Accurate spatial localization requires a mechanism that corrects for errors, which might arise from inaccurate sensory information or neuronal noise. In this paper, we propose that Hippocampal place cells might implement such an error correction mechanism by integrating different sources of information in an approximately Bayes-optimal fashion. We compare the predictions of our model with physi...

Hippocampal place cells fire at different rates when a rodent runs through a given location on its way to different destinations. However, it is unclear whether such firing represents the animal's intended destination or the execution of a specific trajectory. To distinguish between these possibilities, Lister Hooded rats (n = 8) were trained to navigate from a start box to three goal locations...

Land change science has demonstrated that rural livelihoods around the world both drive and reflect changing environmental regimes and political economic/ structural transformations. This article explores the relationship between increasingly globalized rural livelihoods and in-place land change, assessing results from social surveys of smallholding households in the southern Yucatán region. We...