Tax-Increment Financing: The Need for Increased Transparency and Accountability in Local Economic Development Subsidies

Examines the risks to the public of creating tax-increment financing districts to encourage economic development. Proposes stronger guidelines for tax-increment financing program design, governance process, transparency, and developers' accountability

The reproductive success of the parasitic bat fly Basilia nana (Diptera: Nycteribiidae) is affected by the low roost fidelity of its host, the Bechstein's bat ( Myotis bechsteinii )

We studied the reproductive ecology of the bat fly Basilia nana on free-ranging colonial female and solitary male Bechstein's bats (Myotis bechsteinii) during one reproductive season. The reproduction of B. nana took place from April to September, and the production of puparia in bat roosts was high. The metamorphosis of the flies took a minimum of 30days, and at least 86% of the puparia metamorphosed successfully. However, only about 30% of flies from puparia deposited in female roosts and 57% of flies from puparia deposited in male roosts emerged in the presence of Bechstein's bats and were thus able to survive. The significantly higher emergence success of bat flies in male roosts was caused by the higher roost fidelity of the solitary males compared with the social females. Our results indicate that bats can control the reproductive success of bat flies by switching and selecting roost

Beef - Good and Good for You

Relative to foods, eating habits and US consumer preferences, the spectrum is perhaps broader today than it has ever been. And to meet this array of preferences, the beef industry must offer traditional, natural, grassfed and organically produced products. Beef is a nutrient dense source of protein, essential vitamins and minerals. Though recognized as a low-calorie protein source, beef also contains fat, a dense source of energy that fuels the body

Roost selection and roost switching of female Bechstein's bats ( Myotis bechsteinii ) as a strategy of parasite avoidance

Ectoparasites of vertebrates often spend part of their life cycle in their hosts' home. Consequently, hosts should take into account the parasite infestation of a site when selecting where to live. In a field study, we investigated whether colonial female Bechstein's bats (Myotis bechsteinii) adapt their roosting behaviour to the life cycle of the bat fly Basilia nana in order to decrease their contact with infective stages of this parasite. B. nana imagoes live permanently on the bat's body but deposit puparia in the bat's roosts. The flies metamorphose independently in the roosts, but after metamorphosis emerge only in the presence of a potential host. In a field experiment, the bats preferred non-contagious to contagious day-roosts and hence were able to detect either the parasite load of roosts or some correlate with infestation, such as bat droppings. In addition, 9 years of observational data on the natural roosting behaviour of female Bechstein's bats indicate that the bats largely avoid re-occupying roosts when highly contagious puparia are likely to be present as a result of previous occupations of the roosts by the bat colony. Our results indicate that the females adapted their roosting behaviour to the age-dependent contagiousness (emergence probability) of the puparia. However, some infested roosts were re-occupied, which we assume was because these roosts provided advantages to the bats (e.g. a beneficial microclimate) that outweighed the negative effects associated with bat fly infestation. We suggest that roost selection in Bechstein's bats is the outcome of a trade-off between the costs of parasite infestation and beneficial roost qualitie

RAD and the demographic history of a hybrid zone - new insights into the evolution of hybrid sterility

\gls{rad} is a molecular method involving restriction digestion and high throughput DNA sequencing. It promises the systematic subsampling of the genome and highly repeatable scoring of genetic variation in hundreds of individuals at current sequencing costs. However, it comes with its own problems. De novo assembly of \gls{rad} sequence data usually creates many putative reference tags that are only found in one or a few individuals leaving only relatively few markers for population genomic analyses. In the first chapter, I investigate three potential reasons for this outcome -- incomplete digestion, genomic religation and insufficient DNA template amount -- by looking at the occurrence of restriction enzyme recognition sequences within the resultant sequencing data of two different types of \gls{rad} libraries. Analysis of sequence clusters as well as the proportion of concordantly mapping read pairs against a \textit{Locusta} reference sequence suggest that incomplete digestion has affected one of the restriction enzymes used and thereby the number of loci that could be sequenced at sufficient depth across individuals. The other restriction enzyme is found to be much less affected by incomplete digestion and instead random religation of restriction fragments indicates an inefficient adapter ligation step that also leads to low read depths across individuals. Finally, qPCR and read mapping against four newly reconstructed \gls{pe} contig pair reference sequences suggests that low amount of starting DNA and/or high loss of DNA during the library preparation are a major cause for the locus drop-out observed in the de novo assembled read data. In the second part of this thesis, I use \gls{rad} sequence data to make inferences about several aspects of the demographic history of two grasshopper subspecies that form a hybrid zone in the Pyrenees between France and Spain. Sequence data was generated from 36 individuals sampled at the two opposite ends of a hybrid zone that is characterised by hybrid male sterility. I use a state-of-the-art de novo assembly strategy that utilises the shotgun-type \gls{pe} reads from standard \gls{rad} to distinguish alleles from paralogs. I then conduct several population genomic analyses with the programme \texttt{ANGSD} that incorporates uncertainty in genotypes by using genotype likelihoods instead of called genotypes. Results based on more than 1 million filtered sites confirm the high genetic differentiation of the two subspecies found in pre-genomic studies and a surprisingly high genetic diversity in the subspecies that is thought to be derived from a very distant glacial refuge. Further, demographic modelling with the programme $\delta a \delta i$ reveals a robust signal of low but significant gene flow during the divergence of the two subspecies ($Nm \simeq 0.471$, until about 25 \gls{kya}). Allowing for gene flow roughly doubles the divergence time estimate from about 0.5 to 1.1 \gls{mya}. The divergence time estimate without allowing for gene flow is highly consistent with previous estimates from a mitochondrial sequence marker. A history of divergence with gene flow also indicates that alleles causing \glspl{DMI} are unlikely to have risen in frequency by genetic drift alone. The gene flow is clearly asymmetric between the two subspecies in line with many previous studies of the hybrid zone that indicated asymmetric introgression in the same direction. There is no signal of recent (postglacial) gene flow in the data set. However, this may well be due to a lack of power. Further analysis of this data set promises to yield more insights, e.g. loci potentially under divergent selection between the two subspecies