Herbivores play an important role in marine communities. On coral reefs, the diversity and unique feeding behaviours found within this functional group can have a comparably diverse set of impacts in structuring the benthic community. Here, using a spatially explicit model of herbivore foraging, we explore how the spatial pattern of grazing behaviours impacts the recovery of a reef ecosystem, c...

We describe an approach to bounded-memory computation of persistent homology and betti barcodes, in which a computational state is maintained with updates introducing new edges to the underlying neighbourhood graph and percolating the resulting changes into the simplex stream feeding the persistence algorithm. We further discuss the memory consumption and resulting speed and complexity behaviou...

Decoupling of the upper jaw bones--jaw kinesis--is a distinctive feature of the ray-finned fishes, but it is not clear how the innovation is related to the extraordinary diversity of feeding behaviours and feeding ecology in this group. We address this issue in a lineage of ray-finned fishes that is well known for its ecological and functional diversity--African rift lake cichlids. We sequenced...

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) exhibit a variety of foraging behaviours, but neither they nor any baleen whale are known to produce broadband clicks in association with feeding, as do many odontocetes. We recorded underwater behaviour of humpback whales in a northwest Atlantic feeding area using suction-cup attached, multi-sensor, acoustic tags (DTAGs). Here we describe the first reco...

Parents' decisions about whether to breastfeed their infant, and when to introduce complementary foods, are important public health issues. Breastfeeding has beneficial health effects and is widely promoted. Leaflets and magazine articles on infant feeding were collected in 2005, in five European countries (England, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Spain), and screened for statements that link feedin...

Circadian rhythms are certain periodic behaviours exhibited by living organism at different levels, including cellular and system-wide scales. Recent studies have found that the circadian rhythms of several peripheral organs in mammals, such as the liver, are able to entrain their clocks to received signals independent of other system level clocks, in particular when responding to signals gener...

Reporting the diet of recently extinct or very rare taxa, only known by a few museum specimens, is challenging. This study uses X-ray microtomography, a non-destructive investigation method, to obtain the first data about feeding behaviours in the Montserrat galliwasp (Diploglossus montisserrati) by scanning one of the two specimens known to date. The scans revealed the occurrence of shell frag...

BACKGROUND Popular parenting literature promotes different approaches to caring for infants, based around variations in the use of parent-led routines and promoting infant independence. However, there is little empirical evidence of how these early behaviours affect wider parenting choices such as infant feeding. Breastfeeding often requires an infant-led approach, feeding on demand and allowin...

Plant defensive strategies bring into play blends of compounds dependent on the type of attacker and coming from different synthesis pathways. Interest in the field is mainly focused on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and jasmonic acid (JA). By contrast, little is known about the oxidized polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), such as PUFA-hydroperoxides, PUFA-hydroxides, or PUFA-ketones. PUFA-...

The drive to eat is regulated by two compensatory brain pathways termed as homeostatic and hedonic. Hypothalamic orexinergic (ORX) neurons regulate metabolism, feeding and reward, thus controlling physiological and hedonic appetite. Circadian regulation of feeding, metabolism and rhythmic activity of ORX cells are driven by the brain suprachiasmatic clock. How the circadian clock impacts on ORX...