The circovirus Beak and feather disease virus (BFDV) causes psittacine beak and feather disease (PBFD) that is characterised by a chronic disease process associated with feather abnormalities, beak deformities and eventual death in various species of birds in the order Psittaciformes. This disease is seen in captive and wild psittacine species in Australia and several other countries and is a s...

Some birds make use of a distensible oral cavity to produce nearly pure-tone song. Songbirds such as the Northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) have a muscularly distended oropharyngeal-esophageal cavity between the top of the trachea and the open beak. The present paper analyzes the acoustics of this vocal system. It is shown that the resonance of the oropharyngeal-esophageal cavity, vented...

We investigate singularities of all parallel surfaces to a given regular surface. In generic context, the types of singularities of parallel surfaces are cuspidal edge, swallowtail, cuspidal lips, cuspidal beaks, cuspidal butterfly and 3-dimensional D4 singularities. We give criteria for these singularities types in terms of differential geometry (Theorem 3.4 and 3.5).

Beak size and shape in Darwin's finches have traditionally been quantified using a few univariate measurements (length, depth, width). Here we show the improved inferential resolution of geometric morphometric methods, as applied to three hierarchical levels: (i) among seven species on Santa Cruz Island, (ii) among different sites on Santa Cruz for a single species (Geospiza fortis), and (iii) ...

Commercial laying hens are prone to injurious pecking (IP), a common multifactorial problem. A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design assessed the effects of breed (Lohmann Brown Classic (L) or Hyline Brown (H)), beak treatment (infra-red treated (T) or not (NT)), and environment (extra enrichment (EE) or no extra enrichment (NE)) on mortality, behaviour, feather cover, and beak shape. Hens were allocated ...

Abstract Oceanic squids are typical species that sensitive to the environment change. Previous studies on oceanic mainly focus its annually fluctuated abundance under background of climate The changes individual morphological sizes, including body and beak, have been observed in recent years. In this study, Ommastrephes bartramii , an important cephalopod North Pacific Ocean, has selected analy...

Adaptive radiation unfolds as selection acts on the genetic variation underlying functional traits. The nature of this variation can be revealed by studying the tips of an ongoing adaptive radiation. We studied genomic variation at the tips of the Darwin's finch radiation; specifically focusing on polymorphism within, and variation among, three sympatric species of the genus Geospiza. Using res...

Biological invasions can result in new selection pressures driven by the establishment of new biotic interactions. The response of exotic and native species to selection depends critically on the genetic architecture of ecologically relevant traits. In the Florida peninsula, the soapberry bug (Jadera haematoloma) has colonized the recently introduced Chinese flametree, Koelreuteria elegans, as ...