Biological responses of the predatory blue crab and its hard clam prey to ocean acidification and low salinity

How ocean acidification (OA) interacts with other stressors is understudied, particularly for predators and prey. We assessed long-term exposure to decreased pH and low salinity on (1) juvenile blue crab Callinectes sapidus claw pinch force, (2) juvenile hard clam Mercenaria mercenaria survival, growth, and shell structure, and (3) blue crab and hard clam interactions in filmed mesocosm trials. In 2018 and 2019, we held crabs and clams from the Chesapeake Bay, USA, in crossed pH (low: 7.0, high: 8.0) and salinity (low: 15, high: 30) treatments for 11 and 10 wk, respectively. Afterwards, we assessed crab claw pinch force and clam survival, growth, shell structure, and ridge rugosity. Claw pinch force increased with size in both years but weakened in low pH. Clam growth was negative, indicative of shell dissolution, in low pH in both years compared to the control. Growth was also negative in the 2019 high-pH/low-salinity treatment. Clam survival in both years was lowest in the low-pH/low-salinity treatment and highest in the high-pH/high-salinity treatment. Shell damage and ridge rugosity (indicative of deterioration) were intensified under low pH and negatively correlated with clam survival. Overall, clams were more severely affected by both stressors than crabs. In the filmed predator-prey interactions, pH did not substantially alter crab behavior, but crabs spent more time eating and burying in high-salinity treatments and more time moving in low-salinity treatments. Given the complex effects of pH and salinity on blue crabs and hard clams, projections about climate change on predator-prey interactions will be difficult and must consider multiple stressors

Extensive Copy-Number Variation of Young Genes across Stickleback Populations

MM received funding from the Max Planck innovation funds for this project. PGDF was supported by a Marie Curie European Reintegration Grant (proposal nr 270891). CE was supported by German Science Foundation grants (DFG, EI 841/4-1 and EI 841/6-1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Aesthetically Relevant Image Captioning

Image aesthetic quality assessment (AQA) aims to assign numerical aesthetic ratings to images whilst image aesthetic captioning (IAC) aims to generate textual descriptions of the aesthetic aspects of images. In this paper, we study image AQA and IAC together and present a new IAC method termed Aesthetically Relevant Image Captioning (ARIC). Based on the observation that most textual comments of an image are about objects and their interactions rather than aspects of aesthetics, we first introduce the concept of Aesthetic Relevance Score (ARS) of a sentence and have developed a model to automatically label a sentence with its ARS. We then use the ARS to design the ARIC model which includes an ARS weighted IAC loss function and an ARS based diverse aesthetic caption selector (DACS). We present extensive experimental results to show the soundness of the ARS concept and the effectiveness of the ARIC model by demonstrating that texts with higher ARS's can predict the aesthetic ratings more accurately and that the new ARIC model can generate more accurate, aesthetically more relevant and more diverse image captions. Furthermore, a large new research database containing 510K images with over 5 million comments and 350K aesthetic scores, and code for implementing ARIC are available at https://github.com/PengZai/ARIC.Comment: Aceepted by AAAI2023. Code and results available at https://github.com/PengZai/ARI

STUDY ON THE STRUCTURAL STRENGTH OF THE MANTIS SHRIMP

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Scientific questions for the exploration of the terrestrial planets and Jupiter - Advanced planetary missions technology program Progress report

Scientific questions and experimental design for planetary exploration of Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Venu