First evidence of retained sexual capacity and survival in the pyrethroid resistant Sitobion avenae (F.) (Hemiptera: Aphididae) SA3 super-clone following exposure to a pyrethroid at current field-rate

peer-reviewedTeagasc PublicationThe grain aphid Sitobion avenae is a prolific pest of cereal crops worldwide, controlled effectively with pyrethroid insecticides. However, the classic knock down resistance (kdr) mutation, L1014F on the S. avenae sodium channel gene, has been identified as the cause of the recently observed heterozygous (kdr-SR) resistance in the SA3 grain aphid super-clone. Results indicate that the kdr-SR SA3 clone can survive pyrethroid exposure above twice the normal field rate, continuing to reproduce thereafter. Additionally, the SA3 clone was found to be capable of producing sexual oviparous morphs, able to lay eggs following pyrethroid exposure. This demonstrates that possession of the L1014F mutation does not preclude the capacity to produce sexual morphs. This makes the adoption of an effective resistance management strategy imperative, within a wider integrated pest management (IPM) approach to control grain aphid

ARITMETIČKA SREDINA I STANDARDNA DEVIJACIJA

Over the course of the Neogene, the Earth underwent profound climatic shifts from the sustained warmth of the middle Miocene to the development of Plio-Pleistocene glacial–interglacial cycles. Major perturbations in the global carbon cycle have occurred alongside these shifts, however the lack of long-term carbonate system reconstructions currently limits our understanding of the link between changes in CO2, carbon cycling, and climate over this time interval. Here we reconstruct continuous surface ocean pH, CO2, and surface ocean aragonite saturation state using boron isotopes from the planktonic foraminifer Trilobatus trilobus and we perform a sensitivity analysis of the key variables in our calculations (e.g. Bsw, [Ca]sw, CCD). We show that the choice of sw influences both seawater pH and CO2 while [Ca]sw reconstructed dissolved inorganic carbon exerts a significant influence only on CO2. Over the last 22 Myr, the lowest pH levels occurred in the Middle Miocene Climate Optimum (MMCO; 17–14 Myr ago) reaching units in all our scenarios. The extended warmth of the MMCO corresponds to mean CO2 and aragonite saturation state levels of 470–630 ppm and 2.7–3.5, respectively. Despite a general correspondence between our CO2 record and climate, all CO2 scenarios show a peak at ∼9 Ma not matched by corresponding changes in climate reconstructions. This may suggest decoupling (i.e. significant CO2 change without a discernible climate response) for a limited interval in the Late Miocene (11.6–8.5 Ma), although further refinement of our understanding of the temporal evolution of the boron isotopic composition of seawater is necessary to fully evaluate the nature of the relationship between CO2 and climate. Nonetheless, from our long-term view it is clear that low-latitude open ocean marine ecosystems are unlikely to have experienced sustained surface pH and saturation levels below 7.7 and 1.7, respectively, during the past 14 millio

Mapping coral calcification strategies from in situ boron isotope and trace element measurements of the tropical coral Siderastrea siderea

Boron isotopic and elemental analysis of coral aragonite can give important insights into the calcification strategies employed in coral skeletal construction. Traditional methods of analysis have limited spatial (and thus temporal) resolution, hindering attempts to unravel skeletal heterogeneity. Laser ablation mass spectrometry allows a much more refined view, and here we employ these techniques to explore boron isotope and co-varying elemental ratios in the tropical coral Siderastrea siderea. We generate two-dimensional maps of the carbonate parameters within the calcification medium that deposited the skeleton, which reveal large heterogeneities in carbonate chemistry across the macro-structure of a coral polyp. These differences have the potential to bias proxy interpretations, and indicate that different processes facilitated precipitation of different parts of the coral skeleton: the low-density columella being precipitated from a fluid with a carbonate composition closer to seawater, compared to the high-density inter-polyp walls where aragonite saturation was ~ 5 times that of external seawater. Therefore, the skeleton does not precipitate from a spatially homogeneous fluid and its different parts may thus have varying sensitivity to environmental stress. This offers new insights into the mechanisms behind the response of the S. siderea skeletal phenotype to ocean acidification

Citizen Science 2.0 : Data Management Principles to Harness the Power of the Crowd

Citizen science refers to voluntary participation by the general public in scientific endeavors. Although citizen science has a long tradition, the rise of online communities and user-generated web content has the potential to greatly expand its scope and contributions. Citizens spread across a large area will collect more information than an individual researcher can. Because citizen scientists tend to make observations about areas they know well, data are likely to be very detailed. Although the potential for engaging citizen scientists is extensive, there are challenges as well. In this paper we consider one such challenge – creating an environment in which non-experts in a scientific domain can provide appropriate and accurate data regarding their observations. We describe the problem in the context of a research project that includes the development of a website to collect citizen-generated data on the distribution of plants and animals in a geographic region. We propose an approach that can improve the quantity and quality of data collected in such projects by organizing data using instance-based data structures. Potential implications of this approach are discussed and plans for future research to validate the design are described

Enhanced carbon dioxide outgassing from the eastern equatorial Atlantic during the last glacial

Biological productivity and carbon export in the equatorial Atlantic are thought to have been dramatically higher during the last glacial period than during the Holocene. Here we reconstruct the pH and CO2 content of surface waters from the eastern equatorial Atlantic Ocean over the past ~30 k.y. using the boron isotope composition of Globigerinoides ruber (a mixed-layer–dwelling planktic foraminifera). Our new record, combined with previously published data, indicates that during the last glacial, in contrast to today, a strong west to east gradient existed in the extent of air:sea equilibrium with respect to ρCO2 (ΔρCO2), with the eastern equatorial Atlantic acting as a significant source of CO2 (+100 μatm) while the western Atlantic remained close to equilibrium (+25 μatm). This pattern suggests that a five- fold increase in the upwelling rate of deeper waters drove increased Atlantic productivity and large-scale regional cooling during the last glacial, but the higher than modern ΔρCO2 in the east indicates that export production did not keep up with enhanced upwelling of nutrients. However, the downstream decline of ΔρCO2 provides evidence that the unused nutrients from the east were eventually used for biologic carbon export, thereby effectively negating the impact of changes in upwelling on atmospheric CO2 levels. Our findings indicate that the equatorial Atlantic exerted a minimal role in contributing to lower glacial-age atmospheric CO2

SRAO CO Observation of 11 Supernova Remnants in l = 70 to 190 deg

We present the results of 12CO J = 1-0 line observations of eleven Galactic supernova remnants (SNRs) obtained using the Seoul Radio Astronomy Observatory (SRAO) 6-m radio telescope. The observation was made as a part of the SRAO CO survey of SNRs between l = 70 and 190 deg, which is intended to identify SNRs interacting with molecular clouds. The mapping areas for the individual SNRs are determined to cover their full extent in the radio continuum. We used halfbeam grid spacing (60") for 9 SNRs and full-beam grid spacing (120") for the rest. We detected CO emission towards most of the remnants. In six SNRs, molecular clouds showed a good spatial relation with their radio morphology, although no direct evidence for the interaction was detected. Two SNRs are particularly interesting: G85.4+0.7, where there is a filamentary molecular cloud along the radio shell, and 3C434.1, where a large molecular cloud appears to block the western half of the remnant. We briefly summarize the results obtained for individual SNRs.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Science. 12 pages, 12 figures, and 3 table

Constraints on Supersymmetric Flavour Models from b->s gamma

We consider the effects of departures from minimal flavour violations (MFV) in the context of CMSSM-like theories. Second and third generation off-diagonal elements in the Yukawa, sfermion, and trilinear mass matrices are taken to be non-zero at the GUT scale. These are run down together with MSSM parameters to the electroweak scale. We apply constraints from fermion masses and CKM matrix elements to limit the range of the new free parameters of the model. We determine the effect of the departure from MFV on the branching ratio of b->s gamma. We find that only when the expansion parameter in the down-squark sector is relatively large there is a noticeable effect, which tends to relax the lower limit from b->s gamma on the universal gaugino mass. We also find that the expansion parameter associated with the slepton sector needs to be smaller than the corresponding parameter in the down-squark sector in order to be compliant with the bound imposed by the branching ratio of tau-> mu gamma.Comment: Comments: 43 pages, 14 figures. Version accepted for publication: typos corrected, rewritten for better understanding and references adde

Historical Trends in pH and Carbonate Biogeochemistry on the Belize Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System

Coral reefs are important ecosystems that are increasingly negatively impacted by human activities. Understanding which anthropogenic stressors play the most significant role in their decline is vital for the accurate prediction of future trends in coral reef health and for effective mitigation of these threats. Here we present annually resolved boron and carbon isotope measurements of two cores capturing the past 90 years of growth of the tropical reef-building coral Siderastrea siderea from the Belize Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System. The pairing of these two isotope systems allows us to parse the reconstructed pH change into relative changes in net ecosystem productivity and net ecosystem calcification between the two locations. This approach reveals that the relationship between seawater pH and coral calcification, at both a colony and ecosystem level, is complex and cannot simply be modeled as linear or even positive. This study also underscores both the utility of coupled δ11B-δ13C measurements in tracing past biogeochemical cycling in coral reefs and the complexity of this cycling relative to the open ocean

The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification

Ocean acidification may have severe consequences for marine ecosystems; however, assessing its future impact is difficult because laboratory experiments and field observations are limited by their reduced ecologic complexity and sample period, respectively. In contrast, the geological record contains long-term evidence for a variety of global environmental perturbations, including ocean acidification plus their associated biotic responses. We review events exhibiting evidence for elevated atmospheric CO2, global warming, and ocean acidification over the past ~300 million years of Earth's history, some with contemporaneous extinction or evolutionary turnover among marine calcifiers. Although similarities exist, no past event perfectly parallels future projections in terms of disrupting the balance of ocean carbonate chemistry—a consequence of the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place

肩腱板損傷の超音波解析

This Discussion Meeting Issue of the Philosophical Transactions A had its genesis in a Discussion Meeting of the Royal Society which took place on 10–11 October 2011. The Discussion Meeting, entitled ‘Warm climates of the past: a lesson for the future?’, brought together 16 eminent international speakers from the field of palaeoclimate, and was attended by over 280 scientists and members of the public. Many of the speakers have contributed to the papers compiled in this Discussion Meeting Issue. The papers summarize the talks at the meeting, and present further or related work. This Discussion Meeting Issue asks to what extent information gleaned from the study of past climates can aid our understanding of future climate change. Climate change is currently an issue at the forefront of environmental science, and also has important sociological and political implications. Most future predictions are carried out by complex numerical models; however, these models cannot be rigorously tested for scenarios outside of the modern, without making use of past climate data. Furthermore, past climate data can inform our understanding of how the Earth system operates, and can provide important contextual information related to environmental change. All past time periods can be useful in this context; here, we focus on past climates that were warmer than the modern climate, as these are likely to be the most similar to the future. This introductory paper is not meant as a comprehensive overview of all work in this field. Instead, it gives an introduction to the important issues therein, using the papers in this Discussion Meeting Issue, and other works from all the Discussion Meeting speakers, as exemplars of the various ways in which past climates can inform projections of future climate. Furthermore, we present new work that uses a palaeo constraint to quantitatively inform projections of future equilibrium ice sheet change