BACKGROUND In group-living animals, social interactions and their effects on other life activities such as foraging are commonly determined by discrimination among group members. Accordingly, many group-living species evolved sophisticated social recognition abilities such as the ability to recognize familiar individuals, i.e. individuals encountered before. Social familiarity may affect within...

OBJECTIVES To examine the link between human trafficking of minors and childhood adversity. METHODS We compared the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and cumulative childhood adversity (ACE score) among a sample of 913 juvenile justice-involved boys and girls in Florida for whom the Florida child abuse hotline accepted human trafficking abuse reports between 2009 and 2015 wit...

Since real data is time-consuming and expensive to collect, label, and use, researchers have proposed approaches using synthetic variations for the tasks of signature verification, speaker authentication, handwriting recognition, keyword spotting, etc. However, the limitation of real data is particularly critical in the field of writer identification in that in forensics, enemies or criminals u...

A central and classic question in ecology is what causes populations to fluctuate in abundance. Understanding the interaction between natural drivers of fluctuating populations and human exploitation is an issue of paramount importance for conservation and natural resource management. Three main hypotheses have been proposed to explain fluctuations: (i) species interactions, such as predator-pr...

Balanced harvesting, where species or individuals are exploited in accordance with their productivity, has been proposed as a way to minimize the effects of fishing on marine fish communities and ecosystems. This calls for a thorough examination of the consequences balanced harvesting has on fish community structure and yield. We use a size- and trait-based model that resolves individual intera...

There is growing evidence that climate and anthropogenic influences on marine ecosystems are largely manifested by changes in species spatial dynamics. However, less is known about how shifts in species distributions might alter predator-prey overlap and the dynamics of prey populations. We developed a general approach to quantify species spatial overlap and identify the biotic and abiotic vari...

Geographic variation in resource use can produce locally adapted populations that exhibit genetic and phenotypic divergence. In the bird-winged grasshopper (Schistocerca emarginata = [lineata]), we investigate whether genetic data exist in accordance with geographic variation in resource (host) use and coloration. In Texas, juvenile grasshoppers feed almost exclusively on one of two host plants...

In recent years, fisheries management has succeeded in stabilizing and even improving the state of many global fisheries resources [1-5]. This is particularly evident in areas where stocks are exploited in compliance with scientific advice and strong institutional structures are in place [1, 5]. In Europe, the well-managed northeast (NE) Atlantic fish stocks have been recovering in response to ...

the mines are an important section of national heritage and public domain. in legal aspect there are several theories about the mines such as; ownership; public domain and non-proper tier things. some of the islamic jurists believe mines are anfal and others say they are non-proper tier things. although the prohibition or restriction in exploitation of mine is useful because of fairly distribut...