A 2-year study was undertaken to assess the efficacy of Deer Stopper repellent for reducing white-tailed deer damage to ornamental plantings. Efficacy testing was conducted on a captive deer herd at Auburn University’s White-tailed Deer Research Facility and the Stimpson Wildlife Sanctuary, Jackson, AL. Japanese Holly (Ilex crenata), a highly preferred browse species in this area, was used as t...

Classical Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is a preferred method for the evaluation of large-scale infrastructure investment projects in the private and government sector. This paper proposes the use of a method for tradespace exploration as an iterative to classical CBA to help overcome some of its shortcomings. Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration (MATE), a method for system decision making and ...

The MATE workbench is a tool which aims to simplify the tasks of annotating, displaying and querying speech or text corpora. It is designed to help humans create language resources, and to make it easier for different groups to use one another’s data, by providing one tool which can be used with many different annotation schemes. Any annotation scheme which can be converted to XML can be used w...

Selection leads to genetic improvement but also reduces genetic variation in the progeny. When all animals in a population are closely related there is little genetic variation and little scope for further genetic progress. Mate selection procedures are used to help maintain genetic variation, and hence genetic progress, in the future and to avoid the fitness problems related to severe inbreeding.

If you are interested in the diversity of life, you can not ignore the plethora of striking behaviors and morphologies that have been the handiwork of sexual selection. The peacock’s tail is one emblematic result, but a compendium would also include: the songs of birds, frogs, and crickets, the brilliant colors of fishes and corals, the complex odors of moths and mustelids, and the differences ...

Yerba Mate, derived from the leaves of the tree, Ilex paraguariensis, is widely-used as a tea or as an ingredient in formulated foods. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of Yerba Mate extract on weight loss, obesity-related biochemical parameters, and diabetes in high-fat diet-fed mice.To this end, by using in vivo animal models of dietary-induced obesity, we have made the...

Mate preferences are cognitions about the characteristics desired in a romantic partner, and many of these cognitions have links with emotion, such as the preferences for ``mutual attractionÐlove'' and ``emotional stability and maturity''. A large literature has emerged over the past several decades on the characteristics that men and women desire in a long-term mate. This research has addresse...

Female mate-choice copying is a social learning phenomenon whereby a female's observation of a successful sexual interaction between a male and another female increases her likelihood of subsequently preferring that male. Although mate-choice copying has been documented in several vertebrate species, to our knowledge it has not yet been investigated in insects. Here, we investigated whether fem...

Although mate choice by males does occur in nature, our understanding of its importance in driving evolutionary change remains limited compared with that for female mate choice. Recent theoretical models have shown that the evolution of male mate choice is more likely when individual variation in male mating effort and mating preferences exist and positively covary within populations. However, ...

An influential explanation for gender differences in mating strategies is that the sex-specific reproductive constraints faced by human ancestors shaped these differences. Other theorists have emphasized the role of societal factors, hypothesizing, for example, that gender differences in mate preferences should wane in gender-equal societies. However, findings have been ambiguous. Using recent ...