Sex Bias and Social Influences on Savanna Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) Nest Building Behavior

Many primates show sex differences in behavior, particularly social behavior, but also tool use for extractive foraging. All great apes learn to build a supportive structure for sleep. Whether sex differences exist in building, as in extractive foraging, is unknown, and little is known about how building skills develop and vary between individuals in the wild. We therefore aimed to describe the nesting behavior of savanna chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in Fongoli, Senegal, to provide comparative data and to investigate possible sex or age differences in nest building behaviors and nest characteristics. We followed chimpanzee groups to their night nesting sites to record group (55 nights) and individual level data (17 individuals) on nest building initiation and duration (57 nests) during the dry season between October 2007 and March 2008. We returned the following morning to record nest and tree characteristics (71 nests built by 25 individuals). Fongoli chimpanzees nested later than reported for other great apes, but no sex differences in initiating building emerged. Observations were limited but suggest adult females and immature males to nest higher, in larger trees than adult males, and adult females to take longer to build than either adult or immature males. Smaller females and immature males may avoid predation or access thinner, malleable branches, by nesting higher than adult males. These differences suggest that sex differences described for chimpanzee tool use may extend to nest-building, with females investing more time and effort in constructing a safe, warm structure for sleep than males do

Reconsidering Access: Park Facilities and Neighborhood Disamenities in New York City

With increasing concern about rising rates of obesity, public health researchers have begun to examine the availability of parks and other spaces for physical activity, particularly in cities, to assess whether access to parks reduces the risk of obesity. Much of the research in this field has shown that proximity to parks may support increased physical activity in urban environments; however, as yet, there has been limited consideration of environmental impediments or disamenities that might influence individuals’ perceptions or usage of public recreation opportunities. Prior research suggests that neighborhood disamenities, for instance crime, pedestrian safety, and noxious land uses, might dissuade people from using parks or recreational facilities and vary by neighborhood composition. Motivated by such research, this study estimates the relationship between neighborhood compositional characteristics and measures of park facilities, controlling for variation in neighborhood disamenities, using geographic information systems (GIS) data for New York City parks and employing both kernel density estimation and distance measures. The central finding is that attention to neighborhood disamenities can appreciably alter the relationship between neighborhood composition and spatial access to parks. Policy efforts to enhance the recreational opportunities in urban areas should expand beyond a focus on availability to consider also the hazards and disincentives that may influence park usage

Conservation genetics of the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa (Scleractinia)

The cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa is the most important reef-building coral species in the NE Atlantic Ocean. The reef framework creates a complex structural habitat that sustains high species diversity in the deep-sea. During the last decades, powered by improvements in deep-sea research equipment, it has become clear that threats imposed by anthropogenic activities have caused considerable destruction of these cold-water coral ecosystems. To assist cold-water coral management and conservation, this thesis aim to improve the understanding of L. pertusa biology, focusing on genetic population structure, larval development and restoration. First, we investigated the fine-scale genetic structure within and among reefs in the NE Skagerrak using microsatellite markers. Clonal reproduction was common resulting in an aggregated distribution of genotypes within reefs. There was a significant genetic differentiation among reef localities at spatial scales of tens of km (paper I). On the scale of the NE Atlantic genetic structure could be explained in terms of holocene range expansion (paper II). Finally, we compared the whole mitochondrial genomes of two geographically separated individuals (Norway and Italy, respectively) and found virtually no sequence differences (paper III). This result corroborates previous findings of low diversity in Anthozoa mitochondrial DNA, but is also in line with the hypothesis of long-range gene flow and a Mediterranean origin of L. pertusa populations on the Scandinavian continental margin. The larval stage is the only dispersal phase of corals and therefore tightly associated with connectivity among reefs. Using laboratory crossings and larval rearing we show for the first time that L. pertusa produce pelagic larvae that can live in the watercolumn for several weeks (paper IV). Bottom trawling has caused extensive destruction of cold-water coral habitats worldwide. In Sweden only one of six reefs is still alive, but the risk that this reef also will be lost is imminent. We tested the possibility to restore a damaged reef by using transplants of L. pertusa from a healthy reef (paper V). More than three years after the deployment with transplanted coral the survival of fragments was 76%, and the mean size of fragments increased with 39 %, demonstrating the potential for active restoration of cold-water coral habitats