Until recently, the reptile fauna of Christmas Island in Indian Ocean comprised five endemic species (two skinks, two geckos, and one snake) native, non-endemic skink. Four these were common widespread until at least 1979, but by 2012 had disappeared from wild. During years decline, little research was undertaken to examine why disappearing. Here, we use a retrospective expert elicitation rank ...

The body temperature of lizards is strongly influenced by the thermal quality microhabitats, exploiting favourable environmental temperatures, and avoiding exposure to extreme conditions. For these reasons, reptile populations are considered be especially vulnerable changes in temperatures produced climate change. Here, we study physiology critically endangered Añelo Sand Dunes Lizard (Liolaemu...

FitzgeRald, l. a. 2012. Finding and capturing reptiles. In R. W. McDiarmid, M. S. Foster, C. Guyer, J. W. Gibbons, and N. Chernoff (eds.), Reptile Biodiversity: Standard Methods for Inventory and Monitoring, pp. 77–80. University of California Press, Los Angeles, California. ———, M. l. tReglia, n. F. angeli, t. J. hibbitts, d. J. leaVitt, a. l. subalusky, i. lundgRen, and z. hillis-staRR. 2015....

We propose and analyze the Lizard-construction, a way to construct keystream generator (KSG) based stream ciphers with provable 2 3 n-security with respect to generic time-memory-data tradeoff attacks. Note that for the vast majority of known practical KSG-based stream ciphers such attacks reduce the effective key length to the birthday bound n/2, where n denotes the inner state length of the u...

Invasive species can impose novel selection pressures on natives, such as toxins to which native taxa are not adapted. Native species may survive such invasions by evolving mechanisms to avoid toxin exposure or increase toxin tolerance. Red imported fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) employ an alkaloid-based venom to defend their colonies and capture prey. In this study we aim to characterize the s...

Studies of event-related potentials in humans have established larger early posterior negativity (EPN) in response to pictures depicting snakes than to pictures depicting other creatures. Ethological research has recently shown that macaques and wild vervet monkeys respond strongly to partially exposed snake models and scale patterns on the snake skin. Here, we examined whether snake skin patte...

We compare lizard assemblages of Cerrado and Amazonian savannas to test the ecological release hypothesis, which predicts that niche dimensions and abundance should be greater in species inhabiting isolated habitat patches with low species richness (Amazonian savannas and isolated Cerrado patches) when compared with nonisolated areas in central Cerrado with greater species richness. We calculat...