Abstract Tibetan pastoralists have long been using dogs as guards. Since the late 1980s, same dogs, called “Tibetan Mastiffs,” become valuable pets for Han Chinese consumers. This paper discusses how commodification transforms value of these and care relationship between humans dogs. participate in a reciprocal yet distanced through raising guarding, which is not confined to pursuit dogs’ feroc...

In polyandrous species, males seek to maximize their reproductive output by monopolizing their mate. Often the male transfers substances to the female that suppress her sexual receptivity or antagonize the behavior of competing males; both are usually transferred in seminal fluids and represent forms of chemical mate guarding. In moths, more long-range female sex pheromones have been identified...

Abstract Plant intracellular nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat (NLR) receptors play crucial roles in immune responses against pathogens. How diverse NLRs recognize different pathogen effectors remains a significant question. A recent study published Nature uncovered how pepper NLR Tsw detects phytohormone receptors’ interference caused by tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) effector, t...

The life-history strategies of organisms are sculpted over evolutionary time by the relative prospects of present and future reproductive success. As a consequence, animals of many species show flexible behavioral responses to environmental and social change. Here we show that disruption of the habitat of a colony of African cichlid fish, Haplochromis burtoni (Günther) caused males to switch so...

For every hierarchical system of equations S over some complete and distributive lattice we construct an equivalent system with the same set of variables which additionally is guarded. The price to be paid is that the resulting right-hand sides may grow exponentially. We therefore present methods how the exponential blow-up can be avoided. Especially, the loop structure of the variable dependen...

We study the Art Gallery Problem for face guards in polyhedral environments. The problem can be informally stated as: how many (not necessarily convex) windows should we place on the external walls of a dark building, in order to completely illuminate it? We consider both closed and open face guards (i.e., faces with or without their boundary), and we give some upper and lower bounds on the min...

The development of normal patterns along the primary and secondary vertebrate axes depends on the regularity of early Hox gene expression. During initial stages, these expression events form a sequential pattern of partially overlapping domains along the anteroposterior axis in coincidence with the 3' to 5' order of the genes in the Hox cluster (spatial collinearity). In addition, the genes are...