BACKGROUND Echinococcus multilocularis is the source of alveolar echinococcosis, a potentially fatal zoonotic disease. This investigation assessed the presence of E. multilocularis infection in definitive hosts in the Chenaran region of Razavi Khorasan Province, northeastern Iran. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Fecal samples from 77 domestic and stray dogs and 14 wild carnivores were examined...

provide extensive genome sequencing within dogs and cats to map their genetic diversity. The rewards of these efforts for evolutionary biology are considerable. Well-resolved phylogenetic trees of most carnivore families were early accomplishments. Efforts to map genome diversity have found signals of selection in regions that can be related to specific phenotypes. In the dog, the genetic basis...

Since gray wolf reintroduction in 1995, wolf populations in the northern Rocky Mountains have increased dramatically. Incidents of wolf predation on livestock have increased with wolf populations. Although rough tallies of livestock death or injury losses caused by wolf predation are made each year, we know almost nothing about the indirect effects of wolf-livestock interactions on cattle produ...

We used rendezvous site locations of wolf (Canis lupus) packs recorded during 1996–2006 to build a predictive model of gray wolf rendezvous site habitat in Idaho, USA. Variables in our best model included green leaf biomass (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), surface roughness, and profile curvature, indicating that wolves consistently used wet meadow complexes for rendezvous sites. We th...

Wolves are natural hunters. Their ability to hunt in a pack presents an effective model for controlling the motion of multiple robots. In particular, this is highly useful in the field of swarm robotics, where numerous agents act together to produce a collective behavior. This thesis investigates and implements a physical wolf pack in order to create emergent swarm hunting behaviors. These are ...

The reintroduction of the gray wolf into the Northern Rocky Mountains has created many difficult management issues; ranchers fear for their livestock, hunters worry about game populations, ecologists and biologists support the reintroduction, and resource management agencies are caught in the middle. To date (2000), the one hundred plus wolves in the Yellowstone National Park area and approxima...

Named entity recognition (NER) is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP). It able to identify proper nouns, such as person names, locations, and organizations, has been widely used in various tasks. NER can be practical extracting information from social media data. However, the unstructured noisy nature (such grammatical errors typos) causes new challenges for NER, especially low-reso...

We present research in synthetic social behavior for interactive virtual characters. We describe a model from the natural world, the gray wolf (Canis lupus), and the social behavior exhibited by packs of wolves, to use as the target for an interactive installation entitled AlphaWolf, which was shown at SIGGRAPH 2001. We offer a computational model that captures a subset of the social behavior o...