Endemism, which is typically high on islands and in caves, has rarely been studied in the cave entrance ecotone. We investigated the endemism of the spider genus Uthina at cave entrances. Totally 212 spiders were sampled from 46 localities, from Seychelles across Southeast Asia to Fiji. They mostly occur at cave entrances but occasionally appear at various epigean environments. Phylogenetic ana...

Cave fish have rarely been investigated with regard to their inner ear morphology, hearing abilities, and acoustic communication. Based on a previous study that revealed morphological differences in the saccular otolith between a cave and two surface populations of Poecilia mexicana, we checked for additional differences in utricular and lagenar otoliths and tested whether different populations...

Lower Kane Cave, Wyoming (USA), has hydrogen sulfide-bearing springs that discharge into the cave passage. The springs and cave stream harbour white filamentous microbial mats dominated by Epsilonproteobacteria. Recently, novel 16S rRNA gene sequences from the phylum Acidobacteria, subgroup 7, were found in these cave mats. Although Acidobacteria are ubiquitously distributed in many terrestrial...

Our ongoing investigation of early maize farming in the American Southwest has entailed stable isotope analysis and accelerator radiocarbon dating of Basketmaker II remains from sites in the Four Corners region. Here we report radiocarbon dates on a large mortuary assemblage excavated by RichardWetherill in 1893 from a burial cave in southeastern Utah. It has long been thought that all individu...

A CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) is a 3D interactive environment that enables a user to be fully immersed in a virtual world and offers a unique way to visualise and interact with digital information. In this paper we build a foundation of CAVE interaction design by characterising generic affordances of such an environment and enumerating currently conceivable/implementable interacti...

This paper aims to identify the spatial patterning of burning and occupation within an early Middle Stone Age (MSA) sea cave in the Western Cape Province of South Africa by creating a multidimensional model of archaeomagnetic data recovered from all excavated units. Magnetic susceptibility and other mineral magnetic parameters are shown to provide an excellent proxy for the anthropogenic altera...

Caves are perceived as isolated, extreme habitats with a uniquely specialized biota, which long ago led to the idea that caves are "evolutionary dead-ends." This implies that cave-adapted taxa may be doomed for extinction before they can diversify or transition to a more stable state. However, this hypothesis has not been explicitly tested in a phylogenetic framework with multiple independently...

Two new species of Cyclocephala from Central America are described and diagnosed: C. abrelata Ratcliffe and Cave from northern Honduras and C. melolonthida Ratcliffe and Cave from southern El Salvador.

The coprophilous Dimargaris bacillispora is a rarely found and more rarely isolated microfungal species. In this study, we report the repeated observation and isolation of this fungus from a cave sediment used to rear cave-inhabiting isopods and springtails in the laboratory, originating from the Domica Cave, Slovakia. Dimargaris bacillispora was also observed and isolated from the faeces and c...