Tolerance of endolithic algae to elevated temperature and light in the coral Montipora monasteriata from the southern Great Barrier Reef

Photosynthetic endolithic algae and cyanobacteria live within the skeletons of many scleractinians. Under normal conditions, less than 5% of the photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) reaches the green endolithic algae because of the absorbance of light by the endosymbiotic dinoflagellates and the carbonate skeleton. When corals bleach (loose dinoflagellate symbionts), however, the tissue of the corals become highly transparent and photosynthetic microendoliths may be exposed to high levels of both thermal and solar stress. This study explores the consequence of these combined stresses on the phototrophic endoliths inhabiting the skeleton of Montipora monasteriata, growing at Heron Island, on the southern Great Barrier Reef. Endoliths that were exposed to sun after tissue removal were by far more susceptible to thermal photoinhibition and photo-damage than endoliths under coral tissue that contained high concentrations of brown dinoflagellate symbionts. While temperature or light alone did not result in decreased photosynthetic efficiency of the endoliths, combined thermal and solar stress caused a major decrease and delayed recovery. Endoliths protected under intact tissue recovered rapidly and photoacclimated soon after exposure to elevated sea temperatures. Endoliths under naturally occurring bleached tissue of M. monasteriata colonies (bleaching event in March 2004 at Heron Island) acclimated to increased irradiance as the brown symbionts disappeared. We suggest that two major factors determine the outcome of thermal bleaching to the endolith community. The first is the microhabitat and light levels under which a coral grows, and the second is the susceptibility of the coral-dinoflagellates symbiosis to thermal stress. More resistant corals may take longer to bleach allowing endoliths time to acclimate to a new light environment. This in turn may have implications for coral survival

Some Like It Fat: Comparative Ultrastructure of the Embryo in Two Demosponges of the Genus Mycale (Order Poecilosclerida) from Antarctica and the Caribbean

0000-0002-7993-1523© 2015 Riesgo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License [4.0], which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article

Fast estimation of plant growth dynamics using deep neural networks

BackgroundIn recent years, there has been an increase of interest in plant behaviour as represented by growth-driven responses. These are generally classified into nastic (internally driven) and tropic (environmentally driven) movements. Nastic movements include circumnutations, a circular movement of plant organs commonly associated with search and exploration, while tropisms refer to the directed growth of plant organs toward or away from environmental stimuli, such as light and gravity. Tracking these movements is therefore fundamental for the study of plant behaviour. Convolutional neural networks, as used for human and animal pose estimation, offer an interesting avenue for plant tracking. Here we adopted the Social LEAP Estimates Animal Poses (SLEAP) framework for plant tracking. We evaluated it on time-lapse videos of cases spanning a variety of parameters, such as: (i) organ types and imaging angles (e.g., top-view crown leaves vs. side-view shoots and roots), (ii) lighting conditions (full spectrum vs. IR), (iii) plant morphologies and scales (100 μm-scale Arabidopsis seedlings vs. cm-scale sunflowers and beans), and (iv) movement types (circumnutations, tropisms and twining).ResultsOverall, we found SLEAP to be accurate in tracking side views of shoots and roots, requiring only a low number of user-labelled frames for training. Top views of plant crowns made up of multiple leaves were found to be more challenging, due to the changing 2D morphology of leaves, and the occlusions of overlapping leaves. This required a larger number of labelled frames, and the choice of labelling “skeleton” had great impact on prediction accuracy, i.e., a more complex skeleton with fewer individuals (tracking individual plants) provided better results than a simpler skeleton with more individuals (tracking individual leaves).ConclusionsIn all, these results suggest SLEAP is a robust and versatile tool for high-throughput automated tracking of plants, presenting a new avenue for research focusing on plant dynamics.publishe

Memory effects in the electron glass

We investigate theoretically the slow nonexponential relaxation dynamics and associated memory effects of glasses far from equilibrium, which are arguably the most important characteristics of the glass phase. We focus on the electron glass which offers an advantageous starting point compared to other glassy systems both theoretically and experimentally: the model used here is discrete, and experimentally it offers new ways to address these effects by changing a simple experimental parameter —the gate voltage. The full nonlinearized self-consistent model of the dynamics of the occupation numbers in the system successfully recovers the general behavior found in experiments. Our numerical analysis is consistent with both the expected logarithmic relaxation and our understanding of how increasing disorder or interaction slows down the relaxation process, thus yielding a consistent picture of the electron glass, and shedding light on the understanding of glassy behavior in general. We also present a novel finite-size domino effect where the connection to the leads affects the relaxation process of the electron glass in mesoscopic systems. This effect speeds up the relaxation process, and may even reverse the expected effect of interaction; stronger interaction then leading to a faster relaxation

Systematic investigation of electron impact excitation-autoionization from the groud state of highly charged GaI-like ions through. Delta. N=1 transitions

A systematic variation in the line intensity ratios of GaI-like and ZnI-like ions of rare earth elements has been recently observed in spectra emitted in a low density, high temperature tokamak plasma. This variation is shown to be correlated with the gradual opening of autoionizing channels through inner-shell excited configurations of the GaI-like charge-state. These channels enhance the indirect ionization rate of GaI-like ions through excitation-autoionization (EA), effecting the ionization balance and temperatures of greatest abundance. We present a systematic investigation of EA and direct impact ionization (DI) in the GaI-like isoelectronic sequence from Mo (Z = 42) to Dy (Z = 66). As Z decreases from Dy to Pr (Z = 59) the levels of the configuration 3d{sup 9}4p4f, which are excited from the ground state by strong dipole collisional transitions, gradually cross the first ionization limit of the ion and are responsible for this ionization enhancement. When Z decreases further an additional channel is opened through the configuration 3d{sup 9}4p4d. 9 refs., 3 figs., 1 tab