Late Pleistocene remains of Microtus oeconomus (PALLAS, 1776), a species that is not any more a member of the extant fauna of Croatia, have been recently found in Vindija Cave sediments. The sample of 21 teeth shows a slight increase of M1 length and decrease of A/L ratio within the cave sequence from older (G complex; 32 to 42 ka) towards younger strata (E+F complex; layer E is dated at ca. 18...

In prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster), most virgin females are infanticidal. To determine the onset of maternal responsiveness, female prairie voles were tested for maternal behavior as virgins and at different times throughout pregnancy. Female voles that were infanticidal as virgins by and large remained infanticidal throughout pregnancy. In contrast, about 30% of voles that were maternal a...

Metapopulations function and persist through a combination of processes acting at a variety of spatial scales. Although the contributions of stage structure, spatially correlated processes, and the rescue effect to metapopulation dynamics have been investigated in isolation, there is no empirical demonstration of all of these processes shaping dynamics in a single system. Dispersal and settleme...

The Medical Research Council's trial of BCG and vole bacillus vaccines in the prevention of tuberculosis in Great Britain has ended after 20 years' follow-up of the 54 239 participants, who were aged 14 to 15 years when the entered the trial in 1950-2. Participants who were tuberculin positive on entry were left unvaccinated; those who were tuberculin negative were allocated at random to an unv...

When female voles were allowed contact with the stud male for only 1 h at the time of mating, 55% exhibited pregnancy failure when exposed to a strange male 48 h later. When females were made psuedopregnant by hormone treatment and vaginal stimulation (i.e. no stud male involved), 87% exhibited luteal failure when exposed to a strange male. It is suggested that the characteristics of the stud m...

We consider a mathematical model for the indirect transmission via a contaminated environment of a microparasite between two spatially distributed host populations having non-coincident spatial domains. The parasite is benign in a first population and lethal in the second one. Global existence results are given for the resulting reaction-diffusion system coupled with an ordinary differential eq...