Swordtail fish have been studied extensively in relation to diverse aspects of biology; however, little attention has been paid to the patterns of genetic variation within and among populations of swordtails. In this study, we sequenced the mtDNA control region from 65 individuals and 10 populations of Xiphophorus cortezi to investigate the genetic variation within and among populations, includ...

Certain species of bumblebees are difficult to distinguish based on morphology alone due to a lack of diagnostic characters and extensive intraspecific variation in colour patterns. The discussion concerning whether Bombus lapponicus and Bombus monticola are the same species or not, seems to be ongoing. We present a study of 16 speciemens of B. monticola/B. lapponicus from Norway, identified wi...

Bats are important flagship species for biodiversity research; however, diversity in Southeast Asia is considerably underestimated in the current checklists and field guides. Incorporation of DNA barcoding into surveys has revealed numerous species-level taxa overlooked by conventional methods. Inclusion of these taxa in inventories provides a more informative record of diversity, but is proble...

The number of sites sampled must be considered when determining the effort necessary for adequately assessing taxa richness in an ecosystem for bioassessment purposes; however, there have been few studies concerning the number of sites necessary for bioassessment of large rivers. We evaluated the effect of sample size (i.e., number of sites) necessary to collect vertebrate (fish and aquatic amp...

microorganisms constitute more than half of the earth's biomass and in addition to quantity,they represent great diversity. in january 2013, the number of officially registered names forprokaryotic microorganisms at the genus and species levels were, respectively, approximately2100 and 12000. current authorized methods for classification and identification of newmicrobial taxa are polyphasic ap...

The main aim of the present work is to synthesize the information obtained from our dissections of the pectoral and forelimb muscles of representative members of the major extant taxa of limbed amphibians and reptiles and from our review of the literature, in order to provide an account of the comparative anatomy, homologies and evolution of these muscles in the Tetrapoda. The pectoral and fore...

In this paper we study the financial repercussions of the destruction of two fully armed and operational moon-sized battle stations (“Death Stars”) in a 4-year period and the dissolution of the galactic government in Star Wars. The emphasis of this work is to calibrate and simulate a model of the banking and financial systems within the galaxy. Along these lines, we measure the level of systemi...

Methods of inference of the evolutionary history leading to currently extant species, or taxa, have been transformed in recent years by the ready availability of biological sequence data such as that from DNA. While many approaches to this inference problem have been developed, some of the methods most appealing theoretically are so computationally intensive that they cannot be carried out exac...