Social evolution in the order Carnivora may be investigated through comparative studies of behaviourally diverse extant carnivores. The family Hyaenidae serves as a useful model in such interspecies comparisons, as its member species display various degrees of sociality. However, the behaviour of one of the hyaenids, the striped hyaena, Hyaena hyaena, is poorly understood. Further research into...

Experimental and comparative evidence suggests that the striped coats of zebras deter biting fly attack, but the mechanisms by which flies fail to target black-and-white mammals are still opaque. Two hypotheses have been proposed: stripes might serve either to defeat polarotaxis or to obscure the form of the animal. To test these hypotheses, we systematically photographed free-living plains zeb...

Contrast can affect the apparent speed of a moving stimulus. Specifically, when a grey square drifts steadily across stationary black and white stripes, it appears to stop and start as its contrast changes--the so-called 'footsteps illusion'. We now show that what matters is the contrast of the leading and trailing edges, not of the lateral edges. The stripes act by altering the stimulus contra...

The problem sandhoppers face when they find themselves on the dry sand is to reach as quickly as possible the belt of moist sand near the water. In the present study, I ask whether, alongside many other orienting factors, sandhoppers use the optic flow they experience to maintain their bearing relative to the sea-land axis. Adult individuals of Talitrus saltator were released in a transparent P...

The effects of loud sounds on fishes, such as those produced during impulsive pile driving, are an increasing concern in the management of aquatic ecosystems. However, very little is known about such effects. Accordingly, a High Intensity Controlled Impedance Fluid Filled wave Tube (HICI-FT) was used to investigate the effects of sounds produced by impulsive pile driving on two size groups of h...

Striped file systems such as the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) deliver high-bandwidth I/O to applications running on clusters. An open problem of existing striped file systems is how to provide efficient data redundancy to decrease their vulnerability to disk failures. In this paper we describe CSAR, a version of PVFS augmented with a novel redundancy scheme that addresses the efficiency ...

This study aimed at comparing toxic element (Hg, Cd) bioaccumulation in relation to age for bottlenose (Tursiops truncatus) and striped dolphins (Stenella coeruleoalba) from Mediterranean and Atlantic waters. Metal concentrations were also measured in selected prey to infer metal exposure through the diet. As expected, Mediterranean prey exhibited the highest Hg levels, probably as a consequenc...

Paternal care is rare in mammals, occurring mainly in carnivores and neotropical primates, in which the difficulties of long generation time and large individuals lead to small sample sizes. Here, the authors show that paternal care can be easily studied in the four-striped mouse (Rhabdomys pumilio) because (a) captive males show all the patterns of parental care as do females, with the obvious...

Grid technology, as a highly distributed computing environment, requires an optimized access to the data resources to increase data availability. In this paper, we propose a replication technique which is based on parallel transfers from multiple sites containing replicas of the desired file. From each site, we transport in parallel only a portion of the given data source, obtaining the whole f...

The adult cerebellum is organized into longitudinal compartments that are revealed by specific axonal projections (olivocerebellar and corticonuclear projections). These compartments in the adult cerebellum are closely correlated with the striped expression of zebrin II (aldolase C), a late-onset marker of Purkinje cells. Similarly, the embryonic cerebellum is organized into longitudinal compar...