Haematological profile of healthy adult blood donors in Mwanza, Tanzania

Background: While it is customary to apply the same haematological reference ranges, variations exist between populations. This study was conducted to determine hematologic profiles among a local population of north-western Tanzania.Methods:  This was a cross sectional study, which enrolled healthy adult blood donors in Mwanza, Tanzania. Collected blood samples were put in EDTA-coated tubes and haematological indices were determined using Auto Hematology-Analyzer. Results are summarized in medians plus 95% interquartile ranges and compared using either Mann–Whitney U or Kruskal–Wallis tests depending on appropriateness.Results:  A total of 163 (143 males and 20 females) adult healthy blood donors (median age= 31 years) were enrolled.  We found a median haemoglobin level of 15.1 g/dL [10.5-23.8], erythrocytes of 5.3x106/µL [4.1-8.3 x106], haematocrit of 44.0 % [32.4-71.4], total leucocytes of 4300 cells/μL [1700-8500], lymphocytes 1700/μL [800-3000], neutrophils 2100/μL [300-5300]; mid-sized cells (monocytes, eosinophils and basophils) of 400/μL [100-1400] and platelets of 194x103/μL [55.2-379.0 x103].  We observed significantly higher haemoglobin level (P = 0.017) as well as erythrocytes (P = 0.012) and haematocrit (p = 0.006) among males than females.   Conclusion: The percentile range (2.5%-97.5%) which can be used to determine the higher and lower values of haematological profile normal ranges for most indices differ from Western adopted reference values.  Therefore, we recommend a large study to establish local normal hematologic reference values

Variable ecological conditions promote male helping by changing banded mongoose group composition.

PublishedArticle© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Ecological conditions are expected to have an important influence on individuals’ investment in cooperative care. However, the nature of their effects is unclear: both favorable and unfavorable conditions have been found to promote helping behavior. Recent studies provide a possible explanation for these conflicting results by suggesting that increased ecological variability, rather than changes in mean conditions, promote cooperative care. However, no study has tested whether increased ecological variability promotes individual- level helping behavior or the mechanisms involved. We test this hypothesis in a long-term study population of the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose, Mungos mungo, using 14 years of behavioral and meteorological data to explore how the mean and variability of ecological conditions influence individual behavior, body condition, and survival. Female body condition was more sensitive to changes in rainfall leading to poorer female survival and pronounced male-biased group compositions after periods of high rainfall variability. After such periods, older males invested more in helping behavior, potentially because they had fewer mating opportunities. These results provide the first empirical evidence for increased individual helping effort in more variable ecological conditions and suggest this arises because of individual differences in the effect of ecological conditions on body condition and survival, and the knock-on effect on social group composition. Individual differences in sensitivity to environmental variability, and the impacts this has on the internal structure and composition of animal groups, can exert a strong influence on the evolution and maintenance of social behaviors, such as cooperative care.Natural Environment Research CouncilEuropean Research Council Starting Grant (SOCODEV

The social formation of fitness: lifetime consequences of prenatal nutrition and postnatal care in a wild mammal population

Research in medicine and evolutionary biology suggests that the sequencing of parental investment has a crucial impact on offspring life history and health. Here, we take advantage of the synchronous birth system of wild banded mongooses to test experimentally the lifetime consequences to offspring of receiving extra investment prenatally versus postnatally. We provided extra food to half of the breeding females in each group during pregnancy, leaving the other half as matched controls. This manipulation resulted in two categories of experimental offspring in synchronously born litters: (i) ‘prenatal boost’ offspring whose mothers had been fed during pregnancy, and (ii) ‘postnatal boost’ offspring whose mothers were not fed during pregnancy but who received extra alloparental care in the postnatal period. Prenatal boost offspring lived substantially longer as adults, but postnatal boost offspring had higher lifetime reproductive success (LRS) and higher glucocorticoid levels across the lifespan. Both types of experimental offspring had higher LRS than offspring from unmanipulated litters. We found no difference between the two experimental categories of offspring in adult weight, age at first reproduction, oxidative stress or telomere lengths. These findings are rare experimental evidence that prenatal and postnatal investments have distinct effects in moulding individual life history and fitness in wild mammals.Peer reviewe

Journalists in Switzerland. Structure and Attitudes

Results of a survey of Swiss Journalists

The data recorded in each of the three different screen sequences available in Mongoose 2000’s Observations mode.

<p>The data recorded in each of the three different screen sequences available in Mongoose 2000’s Observations mode.</p

Past and present data collection interfaces.

<p>The handheld devices interfaces and checksheets used by the Banded Mongoose Research Project previously (a-c) and in the Mongoose 2000 system (d-f). Panel a: Psion II data logger, model LZ; b: handheld Garmin eTrex GPS unit; c: example of a paper checksheet, here listing all the individuals present in group 1H on a given day.</p

A schematic of the Mongoose 2000 system.

<p>Data are collected at the field site using Android tablets. When fieldworkers return to the field site office they connect the tablets to a Raspberry Pi server running a local Wi-Fi network (Mongoose-web). The tablets synchronise their data to this central server and are also able to download the entire database and email it to UK-based mongoose researchers at the University of Exeter (or any other external location).</p

Higher predation risk for insect prey at low latitudes and elevations

Biotic interactions underlie ecosystem structure and function, but predicting interaction outcomes is difficult. We tested the hypothesis that biotic interaction strength increases towards the Equator, using a global experiment with model caterpillars to measure predation risk. Across an 11,660 km latitudinal gradient spanning six continents, we found increasing predation towards the Equator – with a parallel pattern of increasing predation towards lower elevations. Patterns across both latitude and elevation were driven by arthropod predators, with no systematic trend in attack rates by birds or mammals. These matching gradients at global and regional scales suggest coherent drivers of biotic interaction strength, a finding which needs to be integrated into general theories of herbivory, community organization, and life history evolution