A new species of catshark (Carcharhiniformes, Scyliorhinidae), Scyliorhinus ugoi sp. nov., is described from off Northeastern and Southeastern Brazil. The new species is closest to the Scyliorhinus haeckelii/besnardi group and S. hesperius but differs in background coloration, head width, sexual maturity, and in cranial and body proportions.

A new method of inducing self-fertilization, uniparental cytogamy, yields homozygous germinal and somatic genotypes in the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila. Progeny are highly fertile and show a marked tendency for precocious sexual maturity. This method is highly effective in protocols designed to generate and express nonlethal dominant or recessive mutations.

Performance of three generation (G0,G1 and G2)of indigenous chicken was evaluated to assess the effect of breeding strategies on the productivity. Data on age at sexual maturity (ASM), body weight at sexual maturity (BWM), body weight at one year of age (BWY), eggs per clutch (EGC), clutches per year (CLY), hatchability on set eggs basis (HAT) and survivability of baby chicks up to sexual matur...

Isolation calls produced by dependent young are a fundamental form of communication. For species in which vocal signals remain important to adult communication, the function and social context of vocal behavior changes dramatically with the onset of sexual maturity. The ontogenetic relationship between these distinct forms of acoustic communication is surprisingly under-studied. We conducted a ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the growth and sexual maturity of non-handicapped children with birth weight less than 2000 g at 12 years. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING Infants discharged from a Neonatal Special Care Unit of a referral hospital with birth weight less than 2000 g between 1987-1989 and followed up till the age of 12 years. METHODS The height, weight and head circumference wa...

BACKGROUND Limiting allergen exposure in the sensitization phase has been proposed as a means of primary prevention of asthma, but its effectiveness is debated. HYPOTHESIS Primary prevention of asthma is more effective in limiting asthma symptoms in young guinea pigs compared with adults, whether males or females. METHODS The following experimental groups were used: young/young, sensitized ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS In dioecious species male and female plants experience different selective pressures and often incur different reproductive costs. An increase in reproductive investment habitually results in a reduction of the resources available to other demands, such as vegetative growth. Tree-ring growth is an integrative measure that tracks vegetative investment through the plant's enti...

Prenatal stimulations have been shown to have long-term effects on at reproductive activity. We evaluated the influence of the prenatal stress on the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonad (HPG) axis in male offsprings from mothers with high number of offsprings per litter (HNL) and low number of offsprings per litter (LNL) after hypothesizing that the number of offsprings per litter may modify the effec...

Materials and Methods: The sample comprised 147 girls aged between 7 and 17 years (mean age 12.06 ± 1.99 years). For each girl, one to four panoramic radiographs were collected representing a total of 161 radiographs. The girls were examined in private practice in the South West of France and at Department of Orthodontics (Bordeaux University Hospital) between 2005 and 2013. Dental mineralizati...

The actuarial senescence (i.e., the rate of increase in adult mortality with age) was related to body mass, development period, and age at sexual maturity across 124 taxonomic families of terrestrial vertebrates. Model selection based on Akaike's information criterion values adjusted for small size showed that the rate of aging decreases with increasing body mass, gestation period, age at matur...