The striped skink (Oligosoma striatum) is a poorly known New Zealand endemic species rarely seen in the wild despite ongoing efforts to locate specimens. It is uncertain whether its threatened status is due to low numbers, or to unusual habitat use and activity patterns that make it difficult to detect. Anecdotal reports indicate the species may be partly arboreal. We carried out captive-based ...

While the Mediterranean Sea has been designated as a Global Biodiversity Hotspot, assessments of cetacean population abundance are lacking for large portions of the region, particularly in the southern and eastern basins. The challenges and costs of obtaining the necessary data often result in absent or poor abundance information. We applied capture-recapture models to estimate abundance, survi...

Abstract Aim Theory predicts that ecological specialization should be rare in marine ecosystems, given dispersal barriers are less effective the vastness of sea compared with those terrestrial settings. This paradigm, however, hardly fits classical theories local adaptation, raising question how diversity originates a highly interconnected system. In present study, we investigated arises widely...

The footsteps illusion (FI) demonstrates that an object's background can have a profound effect on the object's perceived speed. This illusion consists of a yellow bar and a blue bar that move over a black-and-white, striped background. Although the bars move at a constant rate, they appear to repeatedly accelerate and decelerate in antiphase with each other. Previously, this illusion has been ...

In studies of behaviour, ecology and evolution, identification of individual organisms can be an invaluable tool, capable of unravelling otherwise cryptic information regarding group structure, movement patterns, population size and mating strategies. The use of natural markings is arguably the least invasive method for identification. However, to be truly useful natural markings must be suffic...

Evolutionary studies have revealed that reproductive proteins in animals and plants often evolve more rapidly than the genome-wide average. The causes of this pattern, which may include relaxed purifying selection, sexual selection, sexual conflict, pathogen resistance, reinforcement, or gene duplication, remain elusive. Investigative expansions to additional taxa and reproductive tissues have ...

Globally, habitat loss in coastal marine systems is a major driver of species decline, and estuaries are particularly susceptible to loss. Along the United States Pacific coast, monospecific eelgrass (Zostera marina) beds form estuarine vegetated habitat. In Morro Bay, California, experienced an unprecedented decline > 95%, from 139 ha 2007 < 6 by 2017. Fish populations were compared before aft...

In this paper, we propose a new region extraction method with a chromakey technique using a two-tone striped background. A chromakey compositing is a technique for separating actors or actresses from a background, and then compositing a different background. The conventional chromakey technique usually uses an unicolored blue or green background, and has a problem that one’s clothes are regarde...

Bi-sensory striped arrays are described in owl and platypus that share some similarities with the other variant of bi-sensory striped array found in primate and carnivore striate cortex: ocular dominance columns. Like ocular dominance columns, the owl and platypus striped systems each involve two different topographic arrays that are cut into parallel stripes, and interdigitated, so that higher...

In the polymorphic white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis), tan-striped males provision nestlings at higher rates than do white-striped males. In a previous study, we found that tan-striped males had lower baseline corticosterone levels than white-striped males during the nestling stage. To determine if this variation in corticosterone influences morph-specific differences in nestling p...