Herpesvirus ateles is an agent indigenous to spider monkeys (Ateles spp.) and causes fulminant lymphomas in various New World primates. Structural and genetic relatedness led to the classification of this virus as a member of the genus Rhadinovirus. It is most closely related to Herpesvirus saimiri. The 108,409-bp light DNA segment of the herpesvirus ateles strain 73 genome has two genes for U-...

The emergence of generalist and specialist behavior in populations of neural networks is studied. Energy extracting ability is included as a property of an organism. In artificial life simulations with organisms living in an environment, the fitness score can be interpreted as the combination of an organisms behavior and the ability of the organism to extract energy from potential food sources ...

Spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) use sites composed of one or more trees for sleeping (sleeping sites and sleeping trees, respectively). Beneath these sites/trees they deposit copious amounts of dung in latrines. This behavior results in a clumped deposition pattern of seeds and nutrients that directly impacts the regeneration of tropical forests. Therefore, information on the density and spat...

The repeated use of sleeping sites by frugivorous vertebrates promotes the deposition and aggregation of copious amounts of seeds in these sites. This spatially contagious pattern of seed deposition has key implications for seed dispersal, particularly because such patterns can persist through recruitment. Assessing the seed rain patterns in sleeping sites thus represents a fundamental step in ...

The rapid loss, fragmentation and degradation of tropical forests threaten the survival of many animal species. However, the way in which these phenomena affect animal health has been poorly explored, thus limiting the design of appropriate conservation strategies. To address this, here we identified using linear mixed models the effect of proximal (diet, activity pattern, hunting and logging) ...

Trichromatic primates have a 'red-green' chromatic channel in addition to luminance and 'blue-yellow' channels. It has been argued that the red-green channel evolved in primates as an adaptation for detecting reddish or yellowish objects, such as ripe fruits, against a background of foliage. However, foraging advantages to trichromatic primates remain unverified by behavioral observation of pri...

El sitio arqueológico Cerro Tapera Vázquez (CTV) se encuentra dentro del Parque Nacional Pre-Delta, en el ambiente insular río Paraná. Dos dataciones radiocarbónicas sobre restos de carbón vegetal ubican la ocupación humana torno a los 600 años radiocarbónicos AP. En este artículo presentan nuevos resultados obtenidos partir reanálisis conjunto faunístico arqueológico. Se identificaron diferent...

Using a conditioning paradigm, we assessed the olfactory sensitivity of six CD-1 mice (Mus musculus) for six sulfur-containing odorants known to be components of the odors of natural predators of the mouse. With all six odorants, the mice discriminated concentrations <0.1 ppm (parts per million) from the solvent, and with five of the six odorants the best-scoring animals were even able to detec...