Anion-type modulates the effect of salt stress on saline lake bacteria

Beside sodium chloride, inland saline aquatic systems often contain other anions than chloride such as hydrogen carbonate and sulfate. Our understanding of the biological effects of salt composition diversity is limited; therefore, the aim of this study was to examine the effect of different anions on the growth of halophilic bacteria. Accordingly, the salt composition and concentration preference of 172 strains isolated from saline and soda lakes that differed in ionic composition was tested using media containing either carbonate, chloride or sulfate as anion in concentration values ranging from 0 to 0.40 mol/L. Differences in salt-type preference among bacterial strains were observed in relationship to the salt composition of the natural habitat they were isolated from indicating specific salt-type adaptation. Sodium carbonate represented the strongest selective force, while majority of strains was well-adapted to growth even at high concentrations of sodium sulfate. Salt preference was to some extent associated with taxonomy, although variations even within the same bacterial species were also identified. Our results suggest that the extent of the effect of dissolved salts in saline lakes is not limited to their concentration but the type of anion also substantially impacts the growth and survival of individual microorganisms

Sex roles in birds : phylogenetic analyses of the influence of climate, life histories and social environment

Sex roles describe sex differences in courtship, mate competition, social pair-bonds and parental care. A key challenge is to identify associations among the components and the drivers of sex roles. Here, we investigate sex roles using data from over 1800 bird species. We found extensive variation and lability in proxies of sex roles, indicating remarkably independent evolution among sex role components. Climate and life history showed weak associations with sex roles. However, adult sex ratio is associated with sexual dimorphism, mating system and parental care, suggesting that social environment is central to explaining variation in sex roles among birds. Our results suggest that sex differences in reproductive behaviour are the result of diverse and idiosyncratic responses to selection. Further understanding of sex roles requires studies at the population level to test how local responses to ecology, life histories and mating opportunities drive processes that shape sex role variation among higher taxa

Contrasting response of microeukaryotic and bacterial communities to the interplay of seasonality and local stressors in shallow soda lakes

Seasonal envir onmental v ariation is a leading dri v er of micr obial planktonic comm unity assemb l y and inter actions. How ever, departur es fr om usual seasonal tr ends ar e often r e ported. To understand the r ole of local str essors in modifying seasonal succession, we sampled fortnightl y, thr oughout thr ee seasons, fiv e nearby shallow soda lakes exposed to identical seasonal and meteorological c hanges. We c har acterised their micr oeukar yotic and bacterial communities by amplicon sequencing of the 16S and 18S rRN A gene , r especti v el y. Biological inter actions w er e inferr ed by anal yses of synchr onous and time-shifted interaction networks, and the keystone taxa of the communities were topologically identified. The lakes showed similar succession patterns during the study period with spring being c har acterised by the r elev ance of trophic interactions and a certain level of community stability followed by a more dynamic and v aria b le summer-autumn period. Adaptation to gener al seasonal c hanges happened thr ough shar ed cor e micr obiome of the lakes. Stochastic events such as desiccation disrupted common network attributes and introduced shifts from the prevalent seasonal trajectory. Our results demonstrated that, despite being extreme and highly variable habitats, shallow soda lakes exhibit certain similarities in the seasonality of their planktonic communities, yet local stressors such as droughts instigate deviations from pr ev alent tr ends to a gr eater extent for micr oeukar yotic than for bacterial comm unities

Body condition and clutch desertion in penduline tit Remiz pendulinus

Parental care is costly since it takes time and energy, and whilst caring the parent may be predated. The benefits of care (i.e., viable offspring) however, are shared equally between the genetic parents: the male and the female. Thus a conflict occurs between the parents over care in many multiple-brooding animals, since each parent prefers the other to do the hard, work of raising young ('sexual conflict over care'). One of the most striking examples of this conflict occurs in a small passerine bird, the penduline tit Remiz pendulinus in which both the male and the female may sequentially mate with several mates within a single breeding season. Incubation and brood-rearing are carried out by a single parent (either the male or the female). However, about 30% of clutches are abandoned by both parents. We investigated how body condition may influence parental behaviour of male and female penduline tits. We show that three measures of body condition (body mass, fat reserves and haematocrit value) are consistent with each other for males, although not for females. Nest building appears to be energetically more demanding than incubation in both sexes. In line with this, we found that males and females in good condition deserted their clutch more often than males and females in poor condition. Individuals in poor condition may care because incubation is energetically less expensive than nest building, and they cannot afford the energy requirement of building a new nest. We argue that understanding body condition in the context of parental care is both challenging and essential, since mathematical models (single-parent optimisation models and game-theory models) provide conflicting predictions. Future work, preferably by experimentally manipulating the body condition of penduline tits, is needed to test how body condition influences caring/deserting decisions in this puzzling avian system

Synthesizing expressive speech from amateur audiobook recordings

Freely available audiobooks are a rich resource of expressive speech recordings that can be used for the purposes of speech synthesis. Natural sounding, expressive synthetic voices have previously been built from audiobooks that contained large amounts of highly expressive speech recorded from a profes- sionally trained speaker. The majority of freely available au- diobooks, however, are read by amateur speakers, are shorter and contain less expressive (less emphatic, less emotional, etc.) speech both in terms of quality and quantity. Synthesiz- ing expressive speech from a typical online audiobook there- fore poses many challenges. In this work we address these challenges by applying a method consisting of minimally su- pervised techniques to align the text with the recorded speech, select groups of expressive speech segments and build expres- sive voices for hidden Markov-model based synthesis using speaker adaptation. Subjective listening tests have shown that the expressive synthetic speech generated with this method is often able to produce utterances suited to an emotional mes- sage. We used a restricted amount of speech data in our exper- iment, in order to show that the method is generally applicable to most typical audiobooks widely available online. QC 20160422</p

Synthesizing expressive speech from amateur audiobook recordings

Freely available audiobooks are a rich resource of expressive speech recordings that can be used for the purposes of speech synthesis. Natural sounding, expressive synthetic voices have previously been built from audiobooks that contained large amounts of highly expressive speech recorded from a profes- sionally trained speaker. The majority of freely available au- diobooks, however, are read by amateur speakers, are shorter and contain less expressive (less emphatic, less emotional, etc.) speech both in terms of quality and quantity. Synthesiz- ing expressive speech from a typical online audiobook there- fore poses many challenges. In this work we address these challenges by applying a method consisting of minimally su- pervised techniques to align the text with the recorded speech, select groups of expressive speech segments and build expres- sive voices for hidden Markov-model based synthesis using speaker adaptation. Subjective listening tests have shown that the expressive synthetic speech generated with this method is often able to produce utterances suited to an emotional mes- sage. We used a restricted amount of speech data in our exper- iment, in order to show that the method is generally applicable to most typical audiobooks widely available online. QC 20160422</p