A Century of Copepods: The U.S. Fisheries Steamer Albatross

The marine invertebrates of North America received little attention before the arrival of Louis Agassiz in 1846. Agassiz and his students, particularly Addison E. Verrill and Richard Rathbun, and Agassiz's colleague Spencer F. Baird, provided the concept and stimulus for expanded investigations. Baird's U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries (1871) provided a principal means, especially through the U.S. Fisheries Steamer Albatross (1882). Rathbun participated in the first and third Albatrossscientific cruises in 1883-84 and published the fist accounts of Albatross parasitic copepods. The first report of Albatross planktonic copepods was published in 1895 by Wilhelm Giesbrecht of the Naples Zoological Station. Other collections were sent to the Norwegian Georg Ossian Sars. The American Charles Branch Wilson eventually added planktonic copepods to his extensive published works on the parasitic copepods from the Albatross. The Albatross copepods from San Francisco Bay were reported upon by Calvin Olin Esterly in 1924. Henry Bryant Bigelow accompanied the last scientific cruise of the Albatross in 1920. Bigelow incorporated the 1920 copepods into his definitive study of the plankton of the Gulf of Maine. The late Otohiko Tanaka, in 1969, published two reviews of Albatross copepods. Albatross copepods will long be worked and reworked. This great ship and her shipmates were mutually inspiring, and they inspire us still

Locking Up Family Values: The Detention of Immigrant Families

On any given day the U.S. government has the capacity to detain over 600 men, women and children apprehended as family units along the U.S. border and within the interior of the country. The detention of families expanded dramatically in 2006 with the opening of the new 512-bed T. Don Hutto Residential Center. Although Hutto has become the centerpiece of a major expansion of immigration detention in America, it builds on and further institutionalizes many of the practices established at the smaller Berks Family Shelter Care Facility in Leesport, PA, where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained a small number of families since 2001. The recent increase in family detention represents a major shift in the U.S. government's treatment of families in immigration proceedings. Prior to the opening of Hutto, the majority of families were either released together from detention or separated from each other and detained individually. Children were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) Division for Unaccompanied Children's Services, and parents were detained in adult facilities. Congress discovered this and took immediate action to rectify it, in keeping with America's tradition of promoting family values. It directed ICE to stop separating families and either to place them in alternative programs or to detain them together in nonpenal, homelike settings. Such Congressional directives were intended to preserve and protect the role of the family as the fundamental unit in our society. However, ICE chose to develop a penal detention model that is fundamentally anti-family and un-American. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children felt it vital to examine the implications of this expanding penal approach to family detention in order to inform the development of policy and practice that serves the best interests of children and families. To that end we visited both the T. Don Hutto Residential Center and the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility and talked with detained families as well as former detainees. What we found was disturbing:- Hutto is a former criminal facility that still looks and feels like a prison, complete with razor wire and prison cells.- Some families with young children have been detained in these facilities for up to two years.- The majority of children detained in these facilities appeared to be under the age of 12.- At night, children as young as six were separated from their parents.- Separation and threats of separation were used as disciplinary tools.- People in detention displayed widespread and obvious psychological trauma. Every woman we spoke with in a private setting cried.- At Hutto pregnant women received inadequate prenatal care.- Children detained at Hutto received one hour of schooling per day.- Families in Hutto received no more than twenty minutes to go through the cafeteria line and feed their children and themselves. Children were frequently sick from the food and losing weight.- Families in Hutto received extremely limited indoor and outdoor recreation time and children did not have any soft toys.Yet not everything we saw reflected a failure of the system. At the Berks facility:- The educational system was appropriate to children's developmental needs.- Families were permitted to participate in field trips.- Children were able to participate in arts and crafts activities.- Families enjoyed ample outdoor recreation time in an open, grassy area. But despite these few positives, the system of family detention is overwhelmingly inappropriate for families.- Both settings strip parents of their role as arbiter and architect of the family unit.- Both facilities place families in settings modeled on the criminal justice system.- There are no licensing requirements for family detention facilities because there is no precedent for family detention in the United States.- There are no standards for family detention, but both facilities violated various aspects of existing standards for the treatment of unaccompanied children and adults in immigration proceedings.Neither facility provides an acceptable model for addressing the reality of the presence of families in our immigration system. Although there is precedent in the adult detention system for the use of alternatives to detention and other pre-hearing release systems,4 ICE has unfortunately made no effort to expand these programs to include families. Based upon these findings, we recommend the following systemic changes to the U.S. government's treatment of families in immigration proceedings:- Discontinue the detention of families in prison-like institutions.- Parole asylum seekers in accordance with international standards and DHS's own policy guidelines- Expand parole and release options for apprehended families.- Implement alternatives to detention for families not eligible for parole or release.- House families not eligible for parole or release in appropriate, nonpenal, homelike facilities.- Expand public-private partnerships to provide legal information and pro bono legal access for all detained families, and to implement alternative programs

Browsing lawns? Responses of Acacia nigrescens to ungulate browsing in an African savanna

We measured browsing-induced responses of Acacia trees to investigate browsing lawns as an analogy to grazing lawns in a semiarid eutrophic African savanna. During the two-year field study, we measured plant tolerance, resistance, and phenological traits, while comparing variation in leaf nitrogen and specific leaf area (SLA) across stands of Acacia nigrescens, Miller, that had experienced markedly different histories of attack from large herbivores. Trees in heavily browsed stands developed (1) tolerance traits such as high regrowth abilities in shoots and leaves, high annual branch growth rates, extensive tree branching and evidence of internal N translocation, and (2) resistance traits such as close thorn spacing. However, phenological escape responses were weak even in heavily browsed stands. Overall, browsing strongly affected plant morpho-functional traits and decreased both the number of trees carrying pods and the number of pods per tree in heavily browsed stands. Hence, there is experimental evidence that tolerance and resistance traits may occur simultaneously at heavily browsed sites, but this comes at the expense of reproductive success. Such tolerance and resistance traits may coexist if browsers trigger and maintain a positive feedback loop in which trees are continually investing in regrowth (tolerance), and if the plant\u27s physical defenses (resistance) are not nutritionally costly and are long-lived. Our results confirm that chronic browsing by ungulates can maintain A. nigrescens trees in a hedged state that is analogous to a grazing lawn. Further research is needed to fully understand the long-term effects of chronic browsing on reproduction within such tree populations, as well as the overall effects on nutrient cycling at the ecosystem level

Determining the effects of sulfur fertility levels on edamame soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merrill] protein components

Edamame [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] a vegetable type soybean is harvested and consumed before reaching its maturity stage (R6). Its health properties drew attention to U.S. consumers because of its high protein content. Proteins are the major structural component of all cells in the living organisms. They are made of essential and non-essential amino acids which play a big role in growth and development and are source of energy. Proteins act as enzymes, antibodies, and hormones and blood protein. Sulfur (S) is a component of the amino acids cysteine (Cys) and methionine (Met) which are the building blocks for proteins. Little is known about how levels fertility influences protein content in edamame soybean. As result, a solution culture experiment in a protected environment was conducted to evaluate the effect of S fertility concentrations on protein content in edamame. Seeds of the ‘Chiba’ edamame were allowed to germinate under greenhouse conditions at 22 °C day/14 °C night for 15 days and transplanted in nutrient solution culture in the fall of 2016 using a modified Hoagland’s solution containing S treatment concentrations of 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 mg S L-1 was delivered as magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) and sodium sulfate (Na2SO4). Treatments were arranged in a randomized complete block design with four replications containing five s treatment levels per replication. The solution was changed every 2 weeks after transplanting until plants reached the R6 maturity stage. Plants were harvested approximately 60 days after planting and weighed for fresh biomass (FM) before tissues were dried at 60 °C prior the extractions and protein content analysis. Elemental S concentrations were measured in oven-dried bean tissue using ICP-MS. Manipulating the S fertility concentrations showed no significant difference on bean accumulation of crude protein (P=0.171), Adjusted protein (P=0.171), ADFNDF (P=0.409), ADFDM (P=0.707), aNDf (P=0.271). The results showed that increasing the S concentration from 4 to 64 mg S L-1 in nutrient solution culture did not affect the protein composition in ‘Chiba’ edamame. KEYWORDS: amino acids, ‘Chiba’, ICP, macronutrient, micronutrient

Planted tree fallows and their influence on soil fertility and maize production in East Africa

Soil fertility depletion is a main constraint to food production in sub-Saharan Africa. This thesis concerns the potential of N2-fixing trees to increase nitrogen inputs to agroforestry systems and accordingly to improve crop production. The suitability of five tropical tree species (including two N2-fixing species, Leucaena leucocephala and Prosopis chilensis) for tree fallows in Tanzania were evaluated by comparing their leaf chemistry, their effects on soil properties and on maize growth. After five years fallow, the per cent total soil N was higher under Prosopis compared to under other tree species. Maize biomass production was higher on soils from Leucaena or Prosopis compared to grass fallow. Prosopis contributed 11% to the total soil C over a period of 8 years. Field experiments in Kenya were performed to test a low-level 15N-tracer technique to estimate biological nitrogen fixation in Sesbania sesban over an 18-months period, and to compare the effects of short-duration tree fallows on two subsequent maize harvests with natural fallow and continuous cropping. We estimated the N derived from atmosphere by Sesbania after 18 months to between 500 and 600 kg ha-1, depending on which plant parts were used for 15N data and on the choice of reference species. We consider the 15N dilution method to be appropriate for quantifying N2 fixation in improved fallows in studies of young trees with high N2-fixing ability. In an experiment examining the effects of tree fallows on subsequent maize crops approximately 70-90% of the N in Sesbania, and 50-70% in Calliandra calothyrsus, was derived from N2-fixation. The quantity of N added by N2-fixation, 280-360 kg N ha-1 for Sesbania and 120-170 kg N ha-1 for Calliandra, resulted in a positive N balance after two cropping seasons of 170-250 kg N ha-1 and 90-140 kg N ha-1 respectively. Both the content of inorganic N in the topsoil and the quantity of N mineralised during rainy seasons were higher after the Sesbania fallows than after the other treatments. The substantial accumulation of N in planted Sesbania demonstrated its potential to increase the sustainability of crop production on N-limited soils

Temporary nutrient deficiency - a difficult case for diagnosis and prognosis by plant analysis

Plant analysis aims to either detect deficiency at the time of sampling (diagnosis) or predict its occurrence at a later stage of growth (prognosis). Its use is based on the presumption that the plant nutrient status will either be constant with plant age or follow a predictable pattern of change over time after sampling. However, a period of deficiency during plant growth followed by the recovery of nutrient uptake to satisfactory rates may cause an irreversible impairment of growth which plant analysis fails to diagnose or predict. Several cases are considered, each involving a temporary deficiency of, or interruption to nutrient supply. Such cases generally involve but are not restricted to micronutrient deficiency. For example, B deficiency impairs early seedling growth when seeds low in B are planted, even on B fertilised soils. Low B concentration in seeds diagnoses the subsequent impairment of seed germination or seedling establishment: however, leaf analysis after emergence does not. Similarly, Zn deficiency impairs early growth of transplanted oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.) seedlings and eventually depresses seed yield. However, leaf analysis during crop growth fails to diagnose a Zn deficiency. Finally, temporary B deficiency induced by low vapour pressure deficit or low soil water especially during reproductive development may depress yield markedly but remain difficult to diagnose by plant analysis. Strategies for diagnosing and predicting such temporary deficiencies are discussed including the measurement of environmental parameters such as pan evaporation or rainfall and their inclusion in multi‐variate regression models of plant response to nutrients

Agroenvironmental transformation in the Sahel: Another kind of “Green Revolution"

millions fed, food security, Sahel, Zai, Stone bunds, Agroforestry, Soil management,