The UN used World Environment Day earlier this month to launch a report highlighting the problems facing the conservation and management of biodiversity in the face of the many assaults humans are making on the natural environment. The report — Dead Planet, Living Planet; Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration for Sustainable Development — highlights not only the preservation of natural ecosyst...

We studied the temperature relations of wild and zoo Aldabra giant tortoises (Aldabrachelys gigantea) focusing on (1) the relationship between environmental temperature and tortoise activity patterns (n = 8 wild individuals) and (2) on tortoise body temperature fluctuations, including how their core and external body temperatures vary in relation to different environmental temperature ranges (s...

This study aims to analyze the sentence structures of fairy tales. It was designed with a descriptive qualitative research Aesop’s tales entitled The Lion and Mouse hare Tortoise as data source by applying method rewriting rules in tree diagram analysis syntactical theory, called PSG (Phrase-Structure Grammar). took 26 which 13 sentences were taken directly from other Hare Tortoise. focused o...

Five red-footed tortoises (Geochelone carbonaria) treated for intestinal nematode parasitism with a single IM injection of ivermectin (0.4 mg/kg) were found in a state of extreme paresis or flaccid paralysis. One tortoise recovered normal motor function over the next 7 to 10 days. The remaining tortoises died within 3 days of receiving the ivermectin. The only consistent postmortem finding was ...

Restriction-fragment polymorphisms in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) were used to evaluate population-genetic structure in the desert tortoise Xerobates agassizi and to clarify evolutionary affinities among species of the gopher tortoise complex. Fourteen informative endonucleases were employed to assay mtDNAs from 56 X. agassizi representing 22 locations throughout the species' range. The mtDNA gen...

Native biodiversity on the Galapagos Archipelago is severely threatened by invasive alien species. On Santa Cruz Island, the abundance of introduced plant species is low in the arid lowlands of the Galapagos National Park, but increases with elevation into unprotected humid highlands. Two common alien plant species, guava (Psidium guajava) and passion fruit (Passiflora edulis) occur at higher e...