One year ago, JJ1 was Europe's most famous mammal. The male brown bear, also known by the more amiable name of 'Bruno', had wandered into Southern Germany from the Trentino in Italy. The appearance of this charismatic animal in a region where the last bear had been seen and killed 170 years ago seemed to fit a trend. Over the past ten years, wolves, elks, beavers and lynxes have been highly pub...

Islands and their problems have elicited a dominant place in maritime historiography. Whether vital stations along important shipping routes or marginal places often by-passed by civilizations and history, their role and condition, their subsistence, their centrality to the flow of goods and the diffusion of cultures and, most prominently, their supposed isolation have much intrigued scholars o...

Xenopus embryos show two distinct rhythmic motor patterns: swimming and struggling. Both can be generated by spinal cord circuitry and evoked by stimulation of a single skin sensory pathway (Soffe, 1991b). This presents a valuable opportunity to explore mechanisms for vertebrate motor pattern switching. Swimming and struggling have been compared using intracellular recording from spinal neurons...

We have investigated the effects of ascending inhibitory pathways on two centrally generated rhythmic motor patterns in a simple vertebrate model, the young Xenopus tadpole. Tadpoles swim when touched, but when grasped respond with slower, stronger struggling movements during which the longitudinal pattern of motor activity is reversed. Surgical spinal cord transection to remove all ascending c...