When resources are limited or patchy, a species may develop some degree of resource partitioning to reduce intra-specific competition. Development of intra-specific resource partitioning is more pronounced in species with clear phenotypic variation among individuals (e.g. age or sex). Southern elephant seals Mirounga leonina have pronounced sexual dimorphism and range widely in size and foragin...

Australian fur seals breed on thirteen islands located in the Bass Strait, Australia. Land access to these islands is restricted, minimising human presence but boat access is still permissible with limitations on approach distances. Thirty-two controlled noise exposure experiments were conducted on breeding Australian fur seals to determine their behavioural response to controlled in-air motor ...

Northern Elephant Seal Skin Disease (NESSD) is a severe, ulcerative, skin condition of unknown cause affecting primarily yearling northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris); it has been associated with decreased levels of circulating thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3). Abnormalities of the thyroid gland that result in decreased hormone levels (hypothyroidism) can result in hair los...

In 1988 and 1989, thousands of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) died in the North Sea from phocine distemper infection. The morphology of thyroid glands from 40 harbor seals found dead on the North Sea coastlines of Schleswig-Holstein, Federal Republic of Germany, during an epizootic of phocine distemper, was compared with the morphology of thyroid glands from five healthy harbor seals collected i...

Language constructs for defining abstract types commonly come in two varieties: those that add and remove seals dynamically as values cross the abstraction boundary, and those that define the boundary statically using a type signature. Abstract types in dynamically-typed languages are generally defined using seals whereas statically-typed languages more typically use a signature; two prominent ...

for dissemination) This deliverable reports on the current status of the service implementation for the automatic evaluation of matching tools, and on the final status of those services. These services have been used in the third SEALS evaluation of matching systems, held in Spring 2012 in coordination with the OAEI 2011.5 campaign. We worked mainly on the tasks of modifying the WP12 BPEL work-...

In the subantarctic fur seal Arctocephalus tropicalis, mothers leave their pups during the rearing period to make long and frequent feeding trips to sea. When a female returns from the ocean, she has to find her pup among several hundred others. Taking into account both spectral and temporal domains, we investigated the individual vocal signature occurring in the 'female attraction call' used b...

This study explores how third-party assurance seals, a privacy service provided by vendors to mitigate customers’ fears, has an impact on on-line customer satisfaction and repeat-purchase intention. It asks the following research questions: Do assurance seals influence on-line service experience? If so, how do they affect consumers’ satisfaction and repeat-purchase intention? The study shows, f...

We propose a continuous-time version of the correlated random walk model for animal telemetry data. The continuous-time formulation allows data that have been nonuniformly collected over time to be modeled without subsampling, interpolation, or aggregation to obtain a set of locations uniformly spaced in time. The model is derived from a continuous-time Ornstein-Uhlenbeck velocity process that ...