Permanências e mutações na definição intergeracional do trabalho infantil Continuities and mutations in the intergenerational definition of child labor

O artigo discute a percepção de famílias dos grupos populares sobre o significado do trabalho infantil, apontando o enquadramento moral, cercado de ambiguidades, das decisões tomadas pela geração mais velha de adiar a entrada dos filhos em ocupações remuneradas. Embora suas decisões possam ser explicadas, pelo menos em parte, pela profundidade das transformações nas mentalidades que acompanharam a gênese da percepção da criança como um ser humano em formação e fundamentaram a transformação do trabalho infantil em prática ilegal e socialmente ilegítima, nosso estudo, não obstante, ajuda a mostrar que as ambiguidades percebidas podem ser explicadas pela história social das gerações em foco, que é, em grande parte, a história das transformações por que passou o Brasil nas últimas décadas, tanto no que diz respeito à sua estrutura produtiva, quanto à sua organização legal e espacial.<br>This paper discusses how low-income families perceive the meaning of child labor. It points out the ambiguous moral vision that supports the decision made by the older generation to postpone the entrance of their children in the labor market. Such decisions can be explained, at least partly, by the deep transformations in mentalities that have followed the genesis of the perception of children as "human beings in formation" and founded the transformation of child labor into an illegal and socially illegitimate practice. Nevertheless, our study shows that the ambiguities noted may also be explained by the social history of the generations focused, which is, mainly, the history of the transformations that have taken place, these last decades, in the productive structures and in the legal and spatial organization of Brazil

From species descriptions to diversity patterns:The validation of taxonomic data as a keystone for ant diversity studies reproducibility and accuracy

Research findings in natural sciences need to be comparable and reproducible to effectively improve our understanding of ecological and behavioural patterns. In this sense, knowledge frontiers in biodiversity studies are directly tied to taxonomic research, especially in species-rich tropical regions. Here we analysed the taxonomic information available in 470 studies on Brazilian ant diversity published in the last 50 years. We aimed to quantify the proportion of studies that provide enough data to validate taxonomic identification, explore the frequency of studies that properly acknowledge their taxonomic background, and investigate the primary resources for ant identification in Brazil. We found that most studies on Brazilian ant diversity (73.6%) explicitly stated the methods used to identify their specimens. However, the proportion of papers that provide complete data for the repository institutions and vouchered specimens is vanishingly small (5.8%). Additionally, only 40.0% of the studies consistently presented taxon authorities and years of description, rarely referencing taxonomic publications correctly. In turn, the number of specialists and institutions consulted for ant identification in Brazil has increased in the last years, along with the number of studies that explicitly provide their taxonomic procedures for ant identification. Our findings highlight a shift between generations regarding the recognition of taxonomy as fundamental science, deepening our understanding of biodiversity

Ant diversity decreases during the dry season:A meta-analysis of the effects of seasonality on ant richness and abundance

Tropical studies traditionally describe insect diversity variation throughout the year. The temporally structured responses of insect assemblages to climate seasonality vary across ecosystems due to gradients of resource availability and limiting ecological factors. These idiosyncratic responses might be particularly true across the vast geographical range of the Brazilian territory, including various environments that harbor one of the most diverse ant faunas worldwide. This study addressed the relationship between ant diversity and climatic seasonality, performing a quantitative review of the published data on ant diversity collected in Brazil. We investigated the seasonality effect on ant abundance and richness described in the literature in 47 papers published between 2000 and 2018. These studies were developed mainly in the Atlantic Forest biome and collected ants with pitfall traps on the soil/litter stratum. We initially carried out a vote-counting procedure by comparing the number of significant results describing seasonal differences in the ant assemblage. We found that most papers described a similar pattern of ant abundance, richness, and species composition between seasons. However, when we performed a meta-analysis, we observed a clear pattern of higher ant abundance and richness in the wet/summer season compared with the dry/winter season. Our meta-analysis reveals that the ant diversity decreases in the dry season, strongly in the Cerrado biome. Additionally, we point out differences in the sampling effort across biomes, indicating the need for further investments in studies focused on temporal diversity patterns, including seasonal effects, on the insect assemblage in biomes less investigated so far. Abstract in Portuguese is available with online material