Do cavies talk? The effect of anthropomorphic picture books on children\u27s knowledge about animals

Many books for young children present animals in fantastical and unrealistic ways, such as wearing clothes, talking and engaging in human-like activities. This research examined whether anthropomorphism in children\u27s books affects children\u27s learning and conceptions of animals, by specifically assessing the impact of depictions (a bird wearing clothes and reading a book) and language (bird described as talking and as having human intentions). In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw picture books featuring realistic drawings of a novel animal. Half of the children also heard factual, realistic language, while the other half heard anthropomorphized language. In Study 2, we replicated the first study using anthropomorphic illustrations of real animals. The results show that the language used to describe animals in books has an effect on children\u27s tendency to attribute human-like traits to animals, and that anthropomorphic storybooks affect younger children\u27s learning of novel facts about animals. These results indicate that anthropomorphized animals in books may not only lead to less learning but also influence children\u27s conceptual knowledge of animals

Detecting Endangered Marine Species in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Imagery Using Point Annotations and Few-Shot Learning

One use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) is the monitoring of habitats associated with threatened, endangered and protected marine species, such as the handfish of Tasmania, Australia. Seafloor imagery collected by AUVs can be used to identify individuals within their broader habitat context, but the sheer volume of imagery collected can overwhelm efforts to locate rare or cryptic individuals. Machine learning models can be used to identify the presence of a particular species in images using a trained object detector, but the lack of training examples reduces detection performance, particularly for rare species that may only have a small number of examples in the wild. In this paper, inspired by recent work in few-shot learning, images and annotations of common marine species are exploited to enhance the ability of the detector to identify rare and cryptic species. Annotated images of six common marine species are used in two ways. Firstly, the common species are used in a pre-training step to allow the backbone to create rich features for marine species. Secondly, a copy-paste operation is used with the common species images to augment the training data. While annotations for more common marine species are available in public datasets, they are often in point format, which is unsuitable for training an object detector. A popular semantic segmentation model efficiently generates bounding box annotations for training from the available point annotations. Our proposed framework is applied to AUV images of handfish, increasing average precision by up to 48\% compared to baseline object detection training. This approach can be applied to other objects with low numbers of annotations and promises to increase the ability to actively monitor threatened, endangered and protected species.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024

Overview of the Fish Diversity of Indian Waters

Fishing is one of the oldest human activities and it developed gradually, when our ancestors moved from the collection of plants and animals to hunting by using tools and weapons. The oldest fishing implements so far identified are harpoons, found in the territory of Congo, and dating about 90,000 years. Interestingly, these harpoons were found associated with the bones of a species of now extinct giant catfish. In India too, it is believed that the development of fishing must have been parallel. There are reports that fishes were grown in reservoirs as early as 320 BC. There are several evidences of fish capture and culture since then. There were evidences to indicate over-fishing in the River Ganges as early as 1785. Russell made the first systematic study of the Indian fish fauna from 1785 to 1789 AD. Sir Francis Day studied the systematics of Indian fishes for over 20 years and listed 351 genera and 1418 species of marine, brackish water and freshwater fishes in 1868. Later, Alcock added 86 new genera and 200 species to the list. Jones and Kumaran (1980) recorded 603 species of fish from the Laccadive archipelago. Of the 603 species of marine fishes belonging to 126 families that are reported from the islands, at least 300 species belong to the ornamental fish category. At present, of the recorded 24,000 species of finfishes in the world, about 2364 species are known to occur in India (www. fishbase. org). Rao (2009) recorded 1371 species in 77 families from the Andaman and Nicobar islands

Current practices in the identification of critical habitat for threatened species

The term critical habitat is used to describe the subset of habitat that is essential to the survival and recovery of species. Some countries legally require that critical habitat of listed threatened and endangered species be identified and protected. However, there is little evidence to suggest that the identification of critical habitat has had much impact on species recovery. We hypothesized that this may be due at least partly to a mismatch between the intent of critical habitat identification, which is to protect sufficient habitat for species persistence and recovery, and its practice. We used content analysis to systematically review critical habitat documents from the United States, Canada, and Australia. In particular, we identified the major trends in type of information used to identify critical habitat and in occupancy of habitat identified as critical. Information about population viability was used to identify critical habitat for only 1% of the species reviewed, and for most species, designated critical habitat did not include unoccupied habitat. Without reference to population viability, it is difficult to determine how much of a species' occupied and unoccupied habitat will be required for persistence. We therefore conclude that the identification of critical habitat remains inconsistent with the goal of protecting sufficient habitat to support persistence and recovery of the species. Ensuring that critical habitat identification aligns more closely with its intent will improve the accuracy of the designations and may therefore help improve the benefits to species recovery when combined with adequate implementation and enforcement of legal protections

Wild Mates Endangered Animals

This project is a promotional piece that raises awareness of endangered animals in the regions of Australia. The project is a small demo of what Wild Mates Endangered Animals would look like as small cards. It involves taking a list of animals from Australia and searching up reference images from online websites to use as templates for creating illustrations. All the illustrations are in a geometric art style made in Adobe Illustrator. The project is a creative composition that shows a great illustrative style but it also addresses the issues of why these animals are becoming endangered. It goes over the critical information that viewers must know about the animals. Additionally, the project also tackles the problem of reducing waste from paper material by being printed on seed embedded paper so that its purpose is to be planted instead of thrown out. The project is meant to bring more of a better understanding of how we view animals in media and how we can see that animals have meaning and life. Letting people have more than one way to view something gives things more of a perspective to it and helps us to take on big issues.Purchase College SUNYGraphic DesignBachelor of Fine ArtsAntonellis, Anthony P