The complete DNA sequence (16,646 bp) of the mitochondrial genome of the African lungfish, Protopterus dolloi, was determined. The evolutionary position of lungfish as possibly the closest living relative among fish of land vertebrates made its mitochondrial DNA sequence particularly interesting. Its mitochondrial gene order conforms to the consensus vertebrate gene order. Several sequence moti...

STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE There are two species of pilot whales in the western Atlantic—the Atlantic or long-finned pilot whale, Globicephala melas, and the short-finned pilot whale, G. macrorhynchus. These species are difficult to differentiate at sea; therefore, some of the descriptive material below refers to Globicephala sp., and is identified as such. The species is considered ...

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An outbreak of a lethal morbillivirus infection of long-finned pilot whales occurred in the Mediterranean Sea from the end of October 2006 through April 2007. Sequence analysis of a 426-bp conserved fragment of the morbillivirus phosphoprotein gene indicates that the virus is more closely related to dolphin morbillivirus than to pilot whale morbillivirus.

The surprising variation in the number of Hox clusters and the genomic architecture within vertebrate lineages, especially within the ray-finned fish, reflects a history of duplications and subsequent lineage-specific gene loss. Recent research on the evolution of conserved non-coding sequences (CNS) in Hox clusters promises to reveal interesting results for functional and phenotypic diversific...

This is the first description of group specific vocalizations of long-finned pilot whales. Sounds were recorded and analyzed from seven different social groups of long-finned pilot whales in the Vestfjord in northern Norway between November 2006 and August 2010. We analyzed the sound recordings by three different methods: First, we created a baseline data-set by doing a classical observer-based...

BACKGROUND The telencephalon shows a remarkable structural diversity among vertebrates. In particular, the everted telencephalon of ray-finned fishes has a markedly different morphology compared to the evaginated telencephalon of all other vertebrates. This difference in development has hampered the comparison between different areas of the pallium of ray-finned fishes and the pallial nuclei of...

Among major vertebrate groups, ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii) collectively display a nearly unrivaled diversity of parental care activities. This fact, coupled with a growing body of phylogenetic data for Actinopterygii, makes these fishes a logical model system for analyzing the evolutionary histories of alternative parental care modes and associated reproductive behaviors. From an extensi...

Finned tube heat exchangers are used in many technological applications both civil and industrial sectors. Their large-scale use requires a design aimed at reaching high thermal efficiency as well avoiding unnecessary waste of resources terms time costs. Therefore, the last decades, research this area has developed considerably numerous studies have been conducted on modeling order to predict (...