How does captivity affect skin colour reflectance of golden mantella frogs?

Coloration is an important trait for social communication in amphibians, being used in intra- and intersexual signalling to express information about individual body condition and health state, amongst other things. The striking colour pattern exhibited by some anuran species are also used in “aposematic” signals to advertise unpalatability to predators. The aim of this study was to investigate how the captive environment affects the colour of golden mantella frogs by comparing captive reared frogs with wild conspecifics. A USB-2000 portable diode-array spectrometer and a xenon strobe light source were used to perform spectrophotometric measurements on captive and wild populations. Hue, chroma and brightness of skin colour were analysed as well as body condition using the scaled mass index. Analyses showed variation among populations, but significant differences were only found between captive and wild populations. Generalised linear mixed models were used to evaluate the effects of body condition on colour variation and showed that animals with lower body condition from one captive population had significantly different coloration than their wild counterparts. Importantly, one captive population was not greatly different in coloration from their wild counterparts – demonstrating that this problem is not inevitable in captivity. These results can have important implications for reintroduction programmes

Cosmology in the Universe with distance dependent Lorentz-violating bakground

We consider a cosmological setup with the inflaton field in the presence of a redshift dependent Lorentz-violating time-like background to address the inflationary regime and other phases of the Universe. We also show that the regime of dark energy at large distances (low redshifts) is essentially dominated by the presence of the Lorentz-violating background.Comment: 8 pages, no figure, Latex, to appear in AHE

Does captivity affects skin colouration of wild caught amphibians?

The current global amphibian crisis has resulted in an unprecedented rate of amphibian-biodiversity loss, resulting in a growth of captive breeding as a conservation tool for amphibians. Maintaining captive populations is important in terms of species conservation for potential reintroductions into the wild. However, it has been shown that wild animals can quickly adapt to captivity leading to phenotypic changes, including skin colouration. It is common to observe amphibians kept in captivity displaying a faded colouration in comparison to their wild counterparts. In amphibians, skin colouration influences courtship and mate preference, consequently affecting breeding success, resulting in advantages for selective females and for strikingly coloured males. The aim of this study was to investigate if the skin colouration of 20 (10 of each species) wild caught frogs Dyscophus antongilii (bright orange) and Scapiophryne madagascariensis (lime green and black) would change after one year in captive conditions at Chester Zoo. A USB-2000 portable diode-array spectrometer and a xenon strobe light source were used to perform spectrophotometric measurements on animals every four months over a period of one year. Three colouration traits were measured, brightness, hue and chroma. Analyses showed no differences for S. madagascariensis on all traits but significant differences for D. antogilii on chroma analysis. Skin colouration is a result of different variables, such as, green colouration is produced by iridophores that reflects light off the surface of purine crystals, while orange colouration is associated with carotenoid accumulation on xantophores. Only colouration associated with pigments was affect by the animals' new environment. The results showed that the effects of captivity were species specific and, husbandry protocols should not be generalized across species. It is necessary to understand the environmental and nutritional needs of each species to ensure the conservation value of captive collections

Levantamento e caracterização morfocultural de rizobactérias isoladas a partir de hortaliças cultivadas em sistema orgânico de produção.

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Do captive golden mantella frogs recognise wild conspecifics calls? Responses to the playback of captive and wild calls

With so many species being threatened with extinction, captive breeding programmes are becoming an important aspect of ex-situ conservation. Captive populations are important for species conservation and for reintroduction back into the wild. Some of the most important wild behaviours to maintain in captive animals are those associated with sexual reproduction, such as courtship and mating. Amphibian reproductive behaviour is associated with call patterns, with studies demonstrating that male advertisement calls elicit positive behavioural responses from females. This study evaluated the response of captive golden mantella frogs Mantella aurantiaca to playback calls from different wild and captive populations (one generation in captivity and more than five generations in captivity). During the experiment, three different calls were used as treatments: one from wild populations, and two from captive populations. Generalised linear mixed models were used to evaluate the effects of the playback treatments on the behaviour of captive frogs: replicates and enclosures were used as random factors. The model showed that vocalisations from wild individuals led to an increase in movement and social behaviours while calls from captive frogs did not. This was especially true of frogs bred for more than five generations in captivity. This could have negative consequences on the reproduction of captive frogs if released to the wild

Construção de um mapa genético para o feijão usando marcadores SNP e a população de RILs Rudá x AND 277.

O principal objetivo deste trabalho foi construir um mapa genético robusto para o feijoeiro-comum usando 376 RILs Rudá x AND 277 e 5.398 marcadores SNP (BARBean6K_3 Illumina BeadChip).CONAF

Lorentz-CPT violation, radiative corrections and finite temperature

In this work we investigate the radiatively induced Chern-Simons-like terms in four-dimensions at zero and finite temperature. We use the approach of rationalizing the fermion propagator up to the leading order in the CPT-violating coupling $b_\mu$. In this approach, we have shown that although the coefficient of Chern-Simons term can be found unambiguously in different regularization schemes at zero or finite temperature, it remains undetermined. We observe a correspondence among results obtained at finite and zero temperature.Comment: To appear in JHEP, 10 pages, 1 eps figure, minor changes and references adde