Speciation of Cataglyphis around the Gibraltar strait: vicariance or dispersal?

Languages do not exist in isolation. They come into contact with each other both in society at large and in the individual speaker, inevitably leaving traces of contact in the process. Convergence, where one or both of the languages of a bilingual change resulting in bilingual varieties that resemble each other more than the respective monolingual varieties, has been suggested as a factor in bilingual production patterns. This thesis furthers our understanding of convergence in bilingual language production by examining diverse patterns of convergence in the semantic domain of motion encoding. Patterns of convergence are studied at the level of both lexical and distributed semantics as well as cross-modally in speech and gestur

Global life trait spectra of resource exploitation in European ants

Relatório de Estágio em Comunicação e Jornalismo, orientado pela Doutora Isabel Maria Ribeiro Ferin Cunha, apresentado ao Departamento de Filosofia, Comunicação e Informação da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra.A assessoria comunicacional tem um papel importante nas organizações públicas e privadas e pode utilizar diversos meios de comunicação. É possível dizer que um desses mesmos meios de comunicação é o jornalismo em linha, sendo que cada vez mais empresas e instituições se publicitam através deste meio os seus eventos e produtos. A Universidade de Coimbra utiliza como forma de contacto com o seu público a plataforma Notícias UC. Esta encontra-se disponível com os mais variados conteúdos não só dedicados à Universidade de Coimbra, mas também relacionados com a cidade que alberga a instituição de ensino superior com 725 anos. Este relatório de estágio pretende abordar a forma de trabalho da Notícias UC e o seu conteúdo noticioso a partir da estrutura de classificação utilizada na consulta e nas quais os artigos são classificados. Tomando como objetivo inicial a análise do número de notícias por faculdade, este relatório fornece não só um estudo sobre o website, mas também aborda a necessidade de uma página que transmita conteúdos mediáticos para o exterior do espaço académico. Palavras-chave: Jornalismo online; assessoria comunicacional; jornalismo multimédia; Notícias UC.Communication consultancy has an important paper in public and private organizations and uses several mediums. Online journalism can be considered as being one of these, as most of the companies and institutions advertise themselves through events or its products. As a connection with the audience, Notícias UC is available with several contents not only concerning the University of Coimbra, but also about the city that harbours the 725-year-old academy. In this report the working methods on Notícias UC will be addressed as its news content through its several categories, in which the articles are classified. Starting with the number of news per faculty, this report aims to provide not only a study about the website, iv but also to deal with the need of a page that broadcasts mediatic contents to the space outside the university. Key-words: Online Journalism; communication consultancy; multimedia journalism; Notícias UC

The ecological benefits of larger colony size may promote polygyny in ants

International audienceHow polygyny evolved in social insect societies is a long-standing question. This phenomenon, which is functionally similar to communal breeding in vertebrates, occurs when several queens come together in the same nest to lay eggs that are raised by workers. As a consequence, polygyny drastically reduces genetic relatedness among nestmates. It has been suggested that the short-term benefits procured by group living may outweigh the costs of sharing the same nesting site and thus contribute to organisms rearing unrelated individuals. However, tests of this hypothesis are still limited. To examine the evolutionary emergence of polygyny, we reviewed the literature to build a data set containing life-history traits for 149 Palearctic ant species and combined this data set with a reconstructed phylogeny. We show that monogyny is the ancestral state and that polygyny has evolved secondarily and independently throughout the phylogenetic tree. The occurrence of polygyny is significantly correlated with larger colony size, dependent colony founding and ecological dominance. Although polydomy (when a colony simultaneously uses several connected nests) tends to occur more frequently in polygynous species, this trend is not significant when phylo-genetic history is accounted for. Overall, our results indicate that polygyny may have evolved in ants in spite of the reduction in nestmate relatedness because large colony size provides immediate ecological advantages, such as the more efficient use of temporal food resources. We suggest that the competitive context of ant communities may have provided the conditions necessary for the evolution of polygyny in some clades

Frequent colony orphaning triggers the production of replacement queens via worker thelytoky in a desert-dwelling ant

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Social Hybridogenesis in the Clonal Ant Cataglyphis hispanica

With a few rare exceptions, the vast majority of animals reproduce sexually [1,2,3]. Some species have, however, evolved alternative modes of reproduction by shifting from classical bisexuality to unorthodox reproductive systems, like parthenogenesis, gynogenesis, or hybridogenesis [4, 5,4, 5]. Under hybridogenesis, both the maternal and paternal genomes are expressed in somatic tissues, whereas the germline is purely maternal. Recently, a form of hybridogenesis at the level of the society has been reported in some ants, where purebred females develop into reproductive queens and interlineage hybrids into sterile workers [6]. Here, we report a unique case of social hybridogenesis in the desert ant Cataglyphis hispanica. Workers are produced exclusively from interbreeding between two distinct genetic lineages, whereas male and female sexuals are produced by asexual reproduction through parthenogenesis. As a consequence, all workers are pure hybridogens, and only maternal genes are perpetuated from one generation to the next. Thus, queens of C. hispanica use sexual reproduction for colony growth, whereas they reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis for germline production.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Anthropogenic impacts in protected areas: assessing the efficiency of conservation efforts using Mediterranean ant communities

International audienceIn countries with high levels of urbanization, protected areas are often subject to human disturbance. In addition to dealing with fragmentation, land managers also have to confront the loss of characteristic ecosystems due to biotic homogenization, which is the increasing similarity of species assemblages among geographically separate regions. Using ants as a model system, we explored whether anthropogenic factors negatively affect biodiversity of protected areas of a regional network. We first analysed the effect of fragmentation and human activity on ant biodiversity within protected areas. Secondly, we tested whether homogenization could occur among protected areas. We sampled 79 plots in the most common habitats of 32 protected areas in southern Spain and calculated ant community richness and diversity indices, endemic richness, and Bray– Curtis similarity indices (between pairs of plots). We related these indices with patch fragmentation and human disturbance variables, taking into account environmental, spatial and landscape covariates. We used ANOSIM to test for differences between similarity indices, specifically among levels of anthropogenic disturbance. Species richness was positively correlated with the distance from the border of the protected areas and the number of endemic species was negatively correlated with the degree of fragmentation. Ant communities were similar within each protected area but differed across regions. Human disturbance was not correlated with community similarity among sampling points. Our approach suggests how the ability of European protected areas to sustain biodiversity is limited because they remain susceptible to anthropogenic impacts. Although ant communities maintained their biological distinctiveness, we reveal how fragmentation within protected areas is important for community richness and endemism maintenance