Prey responses to disturbance cues: Effects of familiarity, kinship, and past experience with risk

Prey can acquire information about predators by eavesdropping on conspecific cues, but these cues are not always reliable. In aquatic systems, disturbance cues are pulses of urea or ammonia that are often released by prey while fleeing a predator; nearby individuals typically display antipredator responses after detecting these cues. Despite the importance of disturbance cues to aquatic prey survival, they remain largely understudied in terms of their function and evolution. Here, I sought to test whether disturbance cues might function as an antipredator signal. Using a series of experiments, I assessed how familiarity and relatedness with individuals releasing the cues affects the antipredator response of the receiver, and whether background risk levels for the cue releaser and receiver play a role in the response exhibited by the receiver. If prey rely more on disturbance cues from familiar, related, or high predation risk background conspecifics, then I expect to see a heightened fright response to these cues. To test this, I raised wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) egg clutches and obtained disturbance cues from groups of tadpoles by simulating a predator chase. Counter to expectation, tadpoles exposed to disturbance cues from unfamiliar individuals displayed a fright response, whereas disturbance cues from familiar individuals were ignored, possibly because these cues became unreliable after being detected repeatedly in the absence of a true threat. Tadpoles responded similarly to the disturbance cues of related and unrelated individuals, suggesting that related individuals did not provide more reliable information. When manipulating background predation risk, high-risk receivers but not low-risk receivers responded to disturbance cues from low-risk donors, suggesting a lower response threshold in high risk prey. Disturbance cues from high-risk donors also elicited more of a fright response in both high- and low-risk receivers. This suggests that high risk prey release more, or more potent disturbance cues. Taken together, these experiments provide strong evidence that tadpoles detect variation in disturbance cues and may be capable of modulating their disturbance cues as antipredator signals. These findings are of important consideration for conservationists studying how Allee effects manifest in threatened aquatic species such as anuran tadpoles

Demographic and evolutionary responses of reef-building corals to climate change

Kevin Bairos-Novak studied coral responses to climate change across the Great Barrier Reef. He modelled coral evolution across future climates and found that coral evolution may keep pace with climate change if carbon emissions are substantially reduced and if healthy corals continue to produce enough new coral recruits

A pilot study on the impact of occupational therapy home programming for young children with Cerebral Palsy

Occupational therapy home programs are a common approach used to provide interventions for children with cerebral palsy, but there is little evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of such programs. This singlegroup pretest–posttest design pilot study evaluated the impact of an occupational therapy home program implemented with 20 children who had spastic hemiplegic cerebral palsy (ages 2–7 years, mean 3.8). We measured impact using Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS), the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI), and the Quality of Upper Extremity Skills Test (QUEST). We measured participation amount through a parent self-report log. Significant changes following intervention occured in scores on the GAS, the PEDI Functional Skills and Caregiver Assistance Scales, and the QUEST, but has found no relationship between participation amount and outcome using the same measures. These promising results suggest that further investigation of the impact of occupational therapy home programs is warranted

Does Applying Biomedical Knowledge Improve Diagnostic Performance When Solving Electrolyte Problems?

Introduction. If physicians apply clinical rather than biomedical knowledge when diagnosing, why do we use the basic sciences as the foundation for clinical teaching? In this study we evaluated the contribution of biomedical knowledge to diagnostic performance when solving electrolyte problems. Method. We asked 13 medical students and 19 nephrologists to solve electrolyte problems while thinking aloud, and determined biomedical knowledge application by protocol analysis. We used logistic regression to study the association between biomedical concepts, clinical experience, and performance.Results. Students and nephrologists applied a similar number of biomedical concepts per case (1.8 (±1.1) vs. 1.8 (±1.2), respectively, p = 0.8), but nephrologists were more successful (86.8% vs. 63.5%, p = 0.003). We found a significant interaction between expertise and applying biomedical concepts (p < 0.05). For students the odds of success increased significantly with applying biomedical concepts (odds ratio 4.66 [2.07, 10.48], p < 0.001), whereas for nephrologists there was only a trend towards improved performance (odds ratio 1.72 [0.94, 3.11], p = 0.07). Conclusions. Our results suggest that improving biomedical knowledge of students should improve their performance on electrolyte problems. The performance of experienced physicians may also be improved, but this requires further study before teaching recommendations can be made

Toward Sensor-Based Random Number Generation for Mobile and IoT Devices

The importance of random number generators (RNGs) to various computing applications is well understood. To ensure a quality level of output, high-entropy sources should be utilized as input. However, the algorithms used have not yet fully evolved to utilize newer technology. Even the Android pseudo RNG (APRNG) merely builds atop the Linux RNG to produce random numbers. This paper presents an exploratory study into methods of generating random numbers on sensor-equipped mobile and Internet of Things devices. We first perform a data collection study across 37 Android devices to determine two things-how much random data is consumed by modern devices, and which sensors are capable of producing sufficiently random data. We use the results of our analysis to create an experimental framework called SensoRNG, which serves as a prototype to test the efficacy of a sensor-based RNG. SensoRNG employs collection of data from on-board sensors and combines them via a lightweight mixing algorithm to produce random numbers. We evaluate SensoRNG with the National Institute of Standards and Technology statistical testing suite and demonstrate that a sensor-based RNG can provide high quality random numbers with only little additional overhead

Synthesizing the First 15 Years of the Basic Communication Course Annual: What Research Tells Us about Effective Pedagogy

Despite the popularity of the both the basic course in communication and the Basic Communication Course Annual, questions still remain about the empirical support for the ways in which we teach the basic course. This essay categorizes and synthesizes 61 empirical studies published from 1989 to 2004 in the Basic Communication Course Annual. The studies are classified into five categories: teaching strategies, teacher and student characteristics, status of the basic course, analyses of texts for the basic course, and assessment of the basic course. Several salient themes are developed and suggestions for future research are advanced

Coral adaptation to climate change: meta-analysis reveals high heritability across multiple traits

Anthropogenic climate change is a rapidly intensifying selection pressure on biodiversity across the globe and, particularly, on the world's coral reefs. The rate of adaptation to climate change is proportional to the amount of phenotypic variation that can be inherited by subsequent generations (i.e., narrow-sense heritability, h2). Thus, traits that have higher heritability (e.g., h2 > 0.5) are likely to adapt to future conditions faster than traits with lower heritability (e.g., h2 0.50) for metrics related to survival and immune responses. Some of these values are higher than typically observed in other taxa, such as survival and growth, while others were more comparable, such as gene expression and photochemistry. There was no detectable effect of temperature on heritability, but narrow-sense heritability estimates were generally lower than broad-sense estimates, indicative of significant non-additive genetic variation across traits. Trait heritability also varied depending on coral life stage, with bleaching and growth in juveniles generally having lower heritability compared to bleaching and growth in larvae and adults. These differences may be the result of previous stabilizing selection on juveniles or may be due to constrained evolution resulting from genetic trade-offs or genetic correlations between growth and thermotolerance. While we find no evidence that heritability decreases under temperature stress, explicit tests of the heritability of thermal tolerance itself—such as coral thermal reaction norm shape—are lacking. Nevertheless, our findings overall reveal high trait heritability for the majority of coral traits, suggesting corals may have a greater potential to adapt to climate change than has been assumed in recent evolutionary models

Occurrence of OXA-107 and ISAba1 in carbapenem-resistant isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii from Croatia

Carbapenem-resistant isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii from intensive care units at Split University Hospital, Split, Croatia, were studied. Most (100 of 106) had ISAba1 inserted upstream of a bla(OXA-107) gene, encoding an unusual OXA-51-type oxacillinase. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis revealed that the isolates formed three clusters belonging to the sequence group 2 (European clone 1) lineage

Impacts of ocean warming on echinoderms: A meta‐analysis

Rising ocean temperatures are threatening marine species and populations worldwide, and ectothermic taxa are particularly vulnerable. Echinoderms are an ecologically important phylum of marine ectotherms and shifts in their population dynamics can have profound impacts on the marine environment. The effects of warming on echinoderms are highly variable across controlled laboratory-based studies. Accordingly, synthesis of these studies will facilitate the better understanding of broad patterns in responses of echinoderms to ocean warming. Herein, a meta-analysis incorporating the results of 85 studies (710 individual responses) is presented, exploring the effects of warming on various performance predictors. The mean responses of echinoderms to all magnitudes of warming were compared across multiple biological responses, ontogenetic life stages, taxonomic classes, and regions, facilitated by multivariate linear mixed effects models. Further models were conducted, which only incorporated responses to warming greater than the projected end-of-century mean annual temperatures at the collection sites. This meta-analysis provides evidence that ocean warming will generally accelerate metabolic rate (+32%) and reduce survival (−35%) in echinoderms, and echinoderms from subtropical (−9%) and tropical (−8%) regions will be the most vulnerable. The relatively high vulnerability of echinoderm larvae to warming (−20%) indicates that this life stage may be a significant developmental bottleneck in the near-future, likely reducing successful recruitment into populations. Furthermore, asteroids appear to be the class of echinoderms that are most negatively affected by elevated temperature (−30%). When considering only responses to magnitudes of warming representative of end-of-century climate change projections, the negative impacts on asteroids, tropical species and juveniles were exacerbated (−51%, −34% and −40% respectively). The results of these analyses enable better predictions of how keystone and invasive echinoderm species may perform in a warmer ocean, and the possible consequences for populations, communities and ecosystems