study into the mauve stinger. “The trouble is that we know so little about jellyfish,” says Haughton. Most people think of them as having little impact on ecosystems. “Now we need to learn, very quickly, about their behaviour and about their breeding patterns in our waters.” The team is getting its first basic data by monitoring the number of jellyfish spotted from the decks of ferries crossing...

Jyoti Rai, Department of Biology, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL 36688. Email: [email protected]. Sediment samples from three sites along Halls Creek were collected for inspection of benthic invertebrates. Sediments were collected from two opposite shores. Two samples were collected from each site. Halls Mill Creek, so far a healthy stream, is being degraded slowly by increase...

Certain species of orb-weavers add extra silk structures, termed a stabilimentum or web decoration, to their webs. In the genus Argiope stabilimenta are silken structures of densely woven zig-zag ribbons. The adaptive value of these stabilimenta is still unclear and controversially discussed. In the course of time, many functional hypotheses have been proposed for silk stabilimenta. Because of ...

Academic lectures offer valuable content, but often do not reach their full potential audience due to the language barrier. Human translations of lectures are too expensive to be widely used. Speech translation technology can be an affordable alternative in this case. State-of-the-art spoken language translation systems utilize statistical models that need to be trained on large amounts of in-d...

Investigations of communication networks in animals have focused primarily on determining whether animals extract information from peripheral contests (eavesdropping) or respond to the presence of bystanders (audience effect). The possibility that an animal’s response to being watched might be context dependent, however, has been explored in far less detail. This study investigated the influenc...