There is growing evidence of changes in the timing of important ecological events, such as flowering in plants and reproduction in animals, in response to climate change, with implications for population decline and biodiversity loss. Recent work has shown that the timing of breeding in wild birds is changing in response to climate change partly because individuals are remarkably flexible in th...

Plants show phenological responses to herbivory. Some enclosure experiments have demonstrated that the onset of the peak flowering season is dependent on grazing pressure. We constructed a mathematical model using Pontryargin's maximum principle to investigate changes in flowering time by examining shifts in resource allocation from vegetative to reproductive plant components. We represented a ...

Influenza epidemics in temperate regions show a characteristic seasonal pattern with peak incidence occurring in winter. Previous research has shown that low absolute humidity and school holidays can both affect influenza transmission. During an epidemic, transmission is strongly influenced by the depletion of susceptibles (i.e., increase in the number of those immune). To assess how much varia...

Seasonality of reproduction is observed in many species of organisms, across taxa, and is influenced by both biotic and abiotic factors. While such seasonality is easy to understand in temperate species exposed to extreme climates, it is more difficult to explain in the tropics. In many tropical species offspring are born during the season of high precipitation, which also coincides with high r...

This study focused on the influence of local-scale environmental factors on key metrics of fish community structure and function at Guanabara Bay, an estuarine system that differs from all other south-western Atlantic estuaries due to the influence of an annual low-intensity upwelling event during late spring and summer, between November and March, when a warm rainy climate prevails. The spatia...

Photoperiod is the proximate cue which times the reproductive period of the sheep and the role of daylength as a "zeitgeber" is evaluated in this report. Although sheep are regarded as a short-day breeding species, the reproductive period of the Suffolk ewe begins on daylengths which are on average 2.5 hours longer than those on which it ends. The reasons for this apparent anomaly are considere...

We analyzed dengue incidence in the period between October 2006-July 2007 of 146 cities around the country were Larval Index Rapid Assay (LIRA) surveillance was carried out in October 2006. Of these, we chosen 61 cities that had 500 or more cases reported during this period. We calculated the incidence coefficient, the force of infection (lambda) and the basic reproduction number (R0) of dengue...

The queen conch Eustrombus gigas is an important fisheries resource in the Caribbean region. In Cuba Island the studies about this resource are very scarce and particularly in the Southeastern regions of the country. With the aim to get important fishery information about this gastropod, adult Queen Conch density and frequency of reproductive activity were evaluated in Cabo Cruz, Cuba, during 2...

Serum protein concentrations provide insight into the nutritional and immune status of organisms. It has been suggested that some marine turtles are capital breeders that fast during the nesting season. In this study, we documented serum proteins in neophyte and remigrant nesting leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea). This allowed us to establish trends across the nesting season to det...

The foraging, territoriality and displacement of the Snail Kite were studied over 232 hours of observations in an urban lake during the dry and wet seasons. The temperature and rainfall variations were used to correlate with predation rates and the correlation coefficients were 0,39 and 0,34, respectively. Snail Kites spent more time foraging during the wet than the dry season when perching is ...