Hermit crabs play an important role in the Northern Adriatic Sea due to their abundance, wide range of symbionts, and function in structuring the benthic community. Small-scale (0.25 m(2)) hypoxia and anoxia were experimentally generated on a sublittoral soft bottom in 24 m depth in the Gulf of Trieste. This approach successfully simulates the seasonal low dissolved oxygen (DO) events here and ...

Vocal behavior in tropical hummingbirds is a new area of study. Here, we present findings on the vocalizations and associated behaviors of two species: Sombre Hummingbird (Aphantochroa cirrhochloris) and Rufous-breasted Hermit (Glaucis hirsutus). These are the only hummingbirds in which the brain areas activated by singing have been demonstrated. They are also among the basal species of their r...

Although many lineages of terrestrial crustaceans have poor olfactory capabilities, crabs in the family Coenobitidae, including the terrestrial hermit crabs in the genus Coenobita, are able to locate food and water using olfactory antennae (antennules) to capture odors from the surrounding air. Terrestrial hermit crabs begin their lives as small marine larvae and must find a suitable place to u...

HERMIT is a rewrite system for Haskell. Haskell, a pure functional programming language, is an ideal candidate for performing equational reasoning. Equational reasoning, replacing equals with equals, is a tunneling mechanism between different, but equivalent, programs. The ability to be agile in representation and implementation, but retain equivalence, brings many benefits. Post-hoc optimizati...

A flexible body image is required by animals if they are to adapt to body changes and move effectively within a structurally complex environment. Here, we show that terrestrial hermit crabs, Coenobita rugosus, which frequently change shells, can modify walking behaviour, dependent on the shape of the shell. Hermit crabs walked along a corridor that had alternating left and right corners; if it ...

Numerous environmental factors can influence body size. Comparing populations in different ecological contexts is one potential approach to elucidating the most critical of such factors. In the current study, we found that the body size of the land hermit crab Coenobita rugosus was significantly larger on Dongsha Island in the South China Sea than on other eco-islands around Southern Taiwan. We...

The area of wooded pasture in Europe has decreased drastically over the last centuries due to abandoned management. Herrevadskloster is a newly formed nature reserve in northern Scania with an unusually long continuity of being an open, grazed woodland containing large old trees. In this study, the reserve was studied to evaluate its potential to further the conservation of the redlisted saprox...

Abundance patterns of the hermit crab Pagurus maclaughlinae and its gastropod shell resources were compared to one another across the shallow subtidal landscape within Tampa Bay, Florida at a landscape (4.88 ha) and a sub-landscape (1 m2) scale. Specifically, we investigated whether the spatial abundance patterns of P. maclaughlinae over time could be explained by the abundance patterns of eith...

I measured the strength of interaction between a marine herbivore and its growing resource over a realistic range of absolute and relative abundances. The herbivores (hermit crabs: Pagurus spp.) have slow and/or weak functional and numerical responses to epiphytic diatoms (Isthmia nervosa), which show logistic growth in the absence of consumers. By isolating this interaction in containers in th...

This paper describes our experience using the HERMIT toolkit to apply well-known transformations to the internal core language of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. HERMIT provides several mechanisms to support writing general-purpose transformations: a domain-specific language for strategic programming specialized to GHC’s core language, a library of primitive rewrites, and a shell-style–based scri...