Preys’ exploitation of predators’ fear: when the caterpillar plays the Gruffalo

Alike the little mouse of the Gruffalo's tale, many harmless preys use intimidating deceptive signals as anti-predator strategies. For example, several caterpillars display eyespots and face-like colour patterns that are thought to mimic the face of snakes as deterrents to insectivorous birds. We develop a theoretical model to investigate the hypothesis that these defensive strategies exploit adaptive cognitive biases of birds, which make them much more likely to confound caterpillars with snakes than vice versa. By focusing on the information-processing mechanisms of decision-making, the model assumes that, during prey assessment, the bird accumulates noisy evidence supporting either the snake-escape or the caterpillar-attack motor responses, which compete against each other for execution. Competition terminates when the evidence for either one of the responses reaches a critical threshold. This model predicts a strong asymmetry and a strong negative correlation between the prey- and the predator-decision thresholds, which increase with the increasing risk of snake predation and assessment uncertainty. The threshold asymmetry causes an asymmetric distribution of false-negative and false-positive errors in the snake–caterpillar decision plane, which makes birds much more likely to be deceived by the intimidating signals of snake-mimicking caterpillars than by the alluring signals of caterpillar-mimicking snakes

Solar radiation distribution inside a monospan greenhouse with the roof entirely covered by photovoltaic panels

In the present work the variation over space and time of the amount of the photosynthetic photons flux density, inside a greenhouse entirely covered with photovoltaic panels was investigated experimentally and numerically. The greenhouse had 10.00 m spam width, 50.00 m length, 3.00 m height of the gutter, 6.60 m height of the edge. Data were acquired in the period 18th April-8th June 2014 by one sensor outside and one inside the experimental greenhouse built in Southern Italy. Numeric simulations were performed by means of commercial software Autodesk® Ecotect®. For the investigated greenhouse model, the exposed percentage the ratio of the calculated insolation at a particular point within an enclosure to the simultaneous unobstructed outdoor insolation under the same sky conditions-was calculated over a three dimensional grid formed by 50×10 ×15 cells each with 1.00×1.00×0.20 m size. The long-term analysis demonstrated a good capability of the numerical model to predict the shading effect inside a photovoltaic greenhouse combining the daily calculated exposed percentage with measurements of solar radiation. The model was able also to predict the qualitative behaviour of the variation of photons flux during the day even if the measured values showed a higher fluctuation of values

Photovoltaic greenhouses: evaluation of shading effect and its influence on agricultural performances

During the last years, European government remuneration polices promoted the realisation of photovoltaic systems integrated with the structures instead of on ground photovoltaic (PV) plants. In this context, in rural areas, greenhouses covered with PV modules have been developed. In order to interdict the building of greenhouses with an amount of opaque panels on covering not coherent with the plant production, local laws assigned a threshold value, usually between 25% and 50%, of the projection on the soil of the roof. These ranges seem not to be based on scientific evaluation about the agricultural performances required to the building but only on empirical assessments. Purpose of this paper is to contribute to better understand the effect of different configurations of PV panels on the covering of a monospan duo-pitched roof greenhouse in terms of shading effect and energy efficiency during different periods of the year. At this aim, daylighting and insolation analysis were performed by means of the software Autodesk® Ecotect® Analysis (Autodesk, Inc., San Rafael, CA, USA) on greenhouse model with different covering ratio of polycrystalline photovoltaic panels on the roof