Submerged Aquatic Vegetation Trends of Back Bay, Virginia

(First Paragraph): Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) is an important part of a healthy Back Bay ecosystem. SAV helps to stabilize sediments that enter the system and to deter shoreline erosion. The submerged macrophytes serve as filters, improving the quality of the water column by removing many pollutants and dissolved nutrients (Clark, et al., 1973; and Stevenson, et al., 1979). These aquatic plants provide important habitats for a variety of wildlife species, which use the grass beds for shelter, feeding and breeding areas. SAV is a major primary producer in the food chain associated within the aquatic and adjoining upland habitats. The added physical characteristics of the plants within the aquatic environment allow for a greater diversity of wildlife species, when compared to habitats not supporting SAV (Stevenson & Confer, 1978)

Epidemiological studies on dengue virus type 3 in Playa municipality, Havana, Cuba, 2001–2002

SummaryObjectivesRecognizing the uniqueness of secondary dengue virus (DENV)-1/3 dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue shock syndrome (DHF/DSS) cases at an interval of 24 years, we sought to estimate DENV infections as well as the ratios between mild disease and DHF/DSS by DENV infection sequence in Playa District (Havana, Cuba) during the 2001–2002 outbreak of dengue virus type 3 (DENV-3).MethodsA retrospective seroepidemiological study was conducted in 2003 in Playa District. Blood samples were collected from a 1% random sample of residents and were studied for the prevalence of dengue neutralizing antibodies.ResultsDENV-3 was found to have infected 7.2% (95% confidence interval (95% CI) 6.0–8.4%) of susceptible individuals (the entire cohort), the majority of whom experienced silent infections. Virtually every individual who had a secondary infection in the sequence DENV-1 then DENV-3 became ill, with a ratio of severe to mild cases of 1:35 (95% CI 1:67–1:23). Secondary infections in the sequence DENV-2/3 were less pathogenic than DENV-1/3. Mild disease accompanying secondary DENV2/3 occurred at a ratio of 1:4.49 infections (95% CI 1:5.77–1:3.42) secondary infections.ConclusionsThe results obtained highlight the role of the infecting serotype and also the sequence of the viral infection in the clinical outcome of a dengue infection

Early Gnathostome Phylogeny Revisited: Multiple Method Consensus

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.A series of recent studies recovered consistent phylogenetic scenarios of jawed vertebrates, such as the paraphyly of placoderms with respect to crown gnathostomes, and antiarchs as the sister group of all other jawed vertebrates. However, some of the hylogenetic relationships within the group have remained controversial, such as the positions of Entelognathus, ptyctodontids, and the Guiyu-lineage that comprises Guiyu, Psarolepis and Achoania. The revision of the dataset in a recent study reveals a modified phylogenetic hypothesis, which shows that some of these phylogenetic conflicts were sourced from a few inadvertent miscodings. The interrelationships of early gnathostomes are addressed based on a combined new dataset with 103 taxa and 335 characters, which is the most comprehensive morphological dataset constructed to date. This dataset is investigated in a phylogenetic context using maximum parsimony (MP), Bayesian inference (BI) and maximum likelihood (ML) approaches in an attempt to explore the consensus and incongruence between the hypotheses of early gnathostome interrelationships recovered from different methods. Our findings consistently corroborate the paraphyly of placoderms, all `acanthodians' as a paraphyletic stem group of chondrichthyans, Entelognathus as a stem gnathostome, and the Guiyu-lineage as stem sarcopterygians. The incongruence using different methods is less significant than the consensus, and mainly relates to the positions of the placoderm Wuttagoonaspis, the stem chondrichthyan Ramirosuarezia, and the stem osteichthyan LophosteusÐthe taxa that are either poorly known or highly specialized in character complement. Given that the different performances of each phylogenetic approach, our study provides an empirical case that the multiple phylogenetic analyses of morphological data are mutually complementary rather than redundant

Between Feasts and Daily Meals

Commensality - Eating and drinking together in a common physical and social setting – is a central element in people’s everyday lives. This makes commensality a particularly important theme within which to explore social relations, social reproduction and the working of politics whether in the present or the past. Archaeological attention has been focused primarily on feasting and other special commensal occasions to the neglect of daily commensality. This volume seeks to redress this imbalance by emphasizing the dynamic relation between feasts and quotidian meals and devoting explicit attention to the micro- politics of Alltag (“the everyday”) rather than solely to special occasions. Case studies drawing on archaeological ( material) as well as written sources range from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in Western Asia and Greece, Formative to late pre-Columbian com munities in Andean South America, and modern Europe