People and Oceans: Managing Marine Areas for Human Well-Being

This booklet demonstrates an awakening within the conservation community that the human relationship with coastal and ocean environments must be evaluated in cultural, social, and economic -- as well as ecological -- dimensions. The major insights from this booklet include:People depend on oceans for food security, recreational opportunities, shoreline protection, climate regulation, and other ecosystem services.Marine resources have tremendous economic value that far exceeds current investments in marine governance, and visitors often are willing to pay far more than existing user fees.MMAs improve human well-being by diversifying livelihoods, enhancing incomes, and improving environmental awareness. They also pose challenges, including loss of access to fishing grounds, inequitable distribution of benefits, dependence on project assistance, and unmet expectations.MMAs are influenced by socioeconomic and governance conditions, including benefits exceeding costs, shared benefits, improved livelihood options, strong community participation, accountable management style, supportive local government, enabling legislation, enforced rules, empowerment and capacity building, strong persistent leadership, and involved external agents.Effective MMAs require strong enforcement, including both soft measures (i.e., education, partnerships) and hard measures (i.e., detection, interception, prosecution, and sanctions).Approaches such as buyouts, conservation agreements, and alternative livelihoods provide positive incentives for altering human behavior

Marine Managed Areas: What, Why, and Where

This paper, which focuses on ocean and coastal areas, explores the challenge of public participation by discussing the role of communities in IM. It draws on a decade of collaboration between academics and community partners to outline the community perspective on both the limiting factors and the opportunities, and a state-of-the-art survey of community involvement in IM, parti-cularly in the Canadian Maritimes. The paper highlights the importance of linking communities and governments, and the need to overcome the growing disconnect between the two. It also illustrates the varied experiences of local coastal communities with IM through three concrete examples. These practical examples lead to two specific out-puts: a set of fundamental IM values and attributes from a community perspective, and a four-step process for facilitating and enabling community-focused IM.The conclusion summarizes key outcomes in terms of inclusivity and active involvement of communities

A Solvable Sequence Evolution Model and Genomic Correlations

We study a minimal model for genome evolution whose elementary processes are single site mutation, duplication and deletion of sequence regions and insertion of random segments. These processes are found to generate long-range correlations in the composition of letters as long as the sequence length is growing, i.e., the combined rates of duplications and insertions are higher than the deletion rate. For constant sequence length, on the other hand, all initial correlations decay exponentially. These results are obtained analytically and by simulations. They are compared with the long-range correlations observed in genomic DNA, and the implications for genome evolution are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Cryptic haplotype‐specific gamete selection yields offspring with optimal MHC immune genes

Females choose specific mates in order to produce fitter offspring. However, several factors interfere with females' control over fertilization of their eggs, including sneaker males and phenotypically unpredictable allele segregation during meiosis. Mate choice at the individual level thus provides only a poor approximation for obtaining the best genetic match. Consequently, postcopulatory sperm selection by female oocytes has been proposed as a mechanism to achieve complementary combinations of parental haplotypes. Here, using controlled in vitro fertilization of three‐spined stickleback eggs, we find haplotype‐specific fertilization bias toward gametes with complementary major histocompatibility complex (MHC) immunogenes. The resulting zygote (and thus offspring) genotypes exhibit an intermediate level of individual MHC diversity that was previously shown to confer highest pathogen resistance. Our finding of haplotype‐specific gamete selection thus represents an intriguing mechanism for fine‐tuned optimization of the offspring's immune gene composition and an evolutionary advantage in the Red Queen dynamics of host‐parasite coevolution

Cryptic haplotype‐specific gamete selection yields offspring with optimal MHC immune genes

Females choose specific mates in order to produce fitter offspring. However, several factors interfere with females' control over fertilization of their eggs, including sneaker males and phenotypically unpredictable allele segregation during meiosis. Mate choice at the individual level thus provides only a poor approximation for obtaining the best genetic match. Consequently, postcopulatory sperm selection by female oocytes has been proposed as a mechanism to achieve complementary combinations of parental haplotypes. Here, using controlled in vitro fertilization of three‐spined stickleback eggs, we find haplotype‐specific fertilization bias toward gametes with complementary major histocompatibility complex (MHC) immunogenes. The resulting zygote (and thus offspring) genotypes exhibit an intermediate level of individual MHC diversity that was previously shown to confer highest pathogen resistance. Our finding of haplotype‐specific gamete selection thus represents an intriguing mechanism for fine‐tuned optimization of the offspring's immune gene composition and an evolutionary advantage in the Red Queen dynamics of host‐parasite coevolution

Cross-node Socioeconomic and Governance Assessments of MMAs

This report is concerned with the socioeconomic and governance dimension of Marine Managed Areas (MMAs), targeting key issues that still impede the design and implementation of MMAs. It looks into the objectives of the MMAs and which types of MMAs were effective at meeting their objectives. It evaluates how socio-economic (e.g., demographics) and governance (e.g. institutional frameworks and processes) characteristics impact on management effectiveness of MMAs (e.g. are wealthy communities correlated with more or less successful MMAs?). In general, this study assesses the social, economic and governance conditions of MMAs in North America (Central America)-Belize; South America (Northeastern)-Brazil; Oceania-Fiji; South America (Northwestern)-Ecuador; and North America (Central America)-Panama; in terms of their impact on factors such as economic development, quality of life, livelihoods, environmental awareness, stakeholder participation, and policy enforcement. The results will substantially contribute to the design and implementation of other socio-economic studies as well as to the employment of more effective MMA management practices in five countries and globally

Transcriptome profiling of immune tissues reveals habitat-specific gene expression between lake and river sticklebacks

The observation of habitat-specific phenotypes suggests the action of natural selection. The three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) has repeatedly colonized and adapted to diverse freshwater habitats across the northern hemisphere since the last glaciation, while giving rise to recurring phenotypes associated with specific habitats. Parapatric lake and river populations of sticklebacks harbour distinct parasite communities, a factor proposed to contribute to adaptive differentiation between these ecotypes. However, little is known about the transcriptional response to the distinct parasite pressure of those fish in a natural setting. Here, we sampled wild-caught sticklebacks across four geographical locations from lake and river habitats differing in their parasite load. We compared gene expression profiles between lake and river populations using 77 whole-transcriptome libraries from two immune-relevant tissues, the head kidney and the spleen. Differential expression analyses revealed 139 genes with habitat-specific expression patterns across the sampled population pairs. Among the 139 differentially expressed genes, eight are annotated with an immune function and 42 have been identified as differentially expressed in previous experimental studies in which fish have been immune challenged. Together, these findings reinforce the hypothesis that parasites contribute to adaptation of sticklebacks in lake and river habitats

Makibaa: The Living out Experience Among the iMiligan of Upper Bauko, Mountain Province

This study was conducted to find out why iMiligan youth leave their biological families and live with non-relatives in other provinces in the lowlands (Makibaa). It also studied the problems they encountered and how they managed such problems. Using a descriptive-qualitative-exploratory method, responses had been identified through key informant interviews and focus group discussions. Findings revealed that the participants moved to various destinations in the lowlands due to push and pull factors. The push factors were economic, geographical, social, political and education. The pull factors were availability and proximity of schools, educational opportunities, values and skills’ development and higher demand from foster parents.Participants described their stay in the lowlands as memorable, rewarding, and gratifying although some encountered negative experiences. Varied strategies were employed by the foster children in response to the negative encounters. The choice of destinations and prospective foster families followed some dynamics such as referrals from former or current baa; by invitation from prospective foster parents or referrals of foster parents; and through request by biological parents for foster families. Keywords: Baa, iMiligan, Igorots, Living out, Makiba

One-arcsecond line-of-sight pointing control on exoplanetsat, a three-unit CubeSat

ExoplanetSat is a proposed 10×10×34-cm space telescope designed to detect down to Earth-sized exoplanets in an orbit out to the habitable zone of bright, Sun-like stars via the transit method. Achieving this science objective requires one-arcsecond line-of-sight pointing control for the science CCD detector, an unprecedented requirement for CubeSats. A two-stage control architecture that coordinates coarse rigid-body attitude control with fine line-of-sight pointing control will be employed to meet this challenging pointing requirement. Detailed testing of the reaction wheels and CMOS detectors has been performed to extract key performance parameters used in simulations. The results of these simulations indicate that a 1.4 arcsecond pointing precision (3σ) is achievable. To meet the 1.0-arcsecond pointing requirement, several options are analyzed. In particular, a new technique to estimate reaction wheel vibrations for feed forward cancellation of reaction wheel vibrations is presented. This estimator adaptively estimates disturbances from noisy sensor measurements and effectively stores disturbance amplitude and phase in memory as a function of wheel speed. In addition to these simulation results, testing results from a hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) testbed demonstrate the capability of the fine pointing control loop. Future plans for complete HWIL testing of the coarse and fine control loops are presented

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS ) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly elliptical 13.7-day orbit around the Earth. During its two-year mission, TESS will employ four wide-field optical CCD cameras to monitor at least 200,000 main-sequence dwarf stars with I[subscript C] (approximately less than) 13 for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Each star will be observed for an interval ranging from one month to one year, depending mainly on the star's ecliptic latitude. The longest observing intervals will be for stars near the ecliptic poles, which are the optimal locations for follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope. Brightness measurements of preselected target stars will be recorded every 2 min, and full frame images will be recorded every 30 min. TESS stars will be 10-100 times brighter than those surveyed by the pioneering Kepler mission. This will make TESS planets easier to characterize with follow-up observations. TESS is expected to find more than a thousand planets smaller than Neptune, including dozens that are comparable in size to the Earth. Public data releases will occur every four months, inviting immediate community-wide efforts to study the new planets. The TESS legacy will be a catalog of the nearest and brightest stars hosting transiting planets, which will endure as highly favorable targets for detailed investigations