Seasonal feeding on bark by gorillas: an unexpected keystone food?

First paragraph: There are a number of reports in the literature of primates feeding on the bark of trees, but bark has only occasionally been considered as a major food to be studied in its own right (e.g., Waser, 1977; Beeson, 1987; Norris, 1988). All the great apes feed on bark at certain times, and clearly have preferences as to which species they choose (e.g., Schaller, 1963; Jones & Sabater Pi. 1971; Casimir, 1975: Nishida, 1976; Goodall, 1977; Rodman, 1977; Sabater Pi, 1977, 1979). Evidence has been presented that bark feeding by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) is a seasonal phenomenon related to scarcity of preferred fruits (Nishida, 1976; Rodman, 1977), and similar conclusions have been drawn from studies of blue monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis) living near plantations of exotic pines (Beeson, 1987; Maganga & Wright, 1992). Bark feeding is also well known in other mammals where, again, it often occurs seasonally (e.g., elephants, Wing & Buss, 1970; grey squirrels, Kenward & Parish, 1986)

The effects of stand characteristics on the understory vegetation in Quercus petraea and Q. cerris dominated forests

The shelterwood system used in Hungary has many effects on the composition and structure of the herb layer. The aim of our study was to identify the main variables that affect the occurence of herbs and seedlings in Turkey oak-sessile oak (Quercus cerris and Q. petraea) stands. The study was carried out in the Bükk mountains, Hungary. 122 sampling plots were established in 50-150 year old oak forests, where we studied the species composition and structure of the understorey and overstorey. The occurence of herbs was affected by canopy closure, the heterogenity and patchiness of the stand, the slope and the east-west component of the aspect. The composition of saplings was significantly explained by the ratio of the two major oak species in the stand and the proximity of the adult plants. An important result for forest management was that sessile oaks were able to regenerate almost only where they were dominant in the overstorey

Chimpanzees Share Forbidden Fruit

The sharing of wild plant foods is infrequent in chimpanzees, but in chimpanzee communities that engage in hunting, meat is frequently used as a ‘social tool’ for nurturing alliances and social bonds. Here we report the only recorded example of regular sharing of plant foods by unrelated, non-provisioned wild chimpanzees, and the contexts in which these sharing behaviours occur. From direct observations, adult chimpanzees at Bossou (Republic of Guinea, West Africa) very rarely transferred wild plant foods. In contrast, they shared cultivated plant foods much more frequently (58 out of 59 food sharing events). Sharing primarily consists of adult males allowing reproductively cycling females to take food that they possess. We propose that hypotheses focussing on ‘food-for-sex and -grooming’ and ‘showing-off’ strategies plausibly account for observed sharing behaviours. A changing human-dominated landscape presents chimpanzees with fresh challenges, and our observations suggest that crop-raiding provides adult male chimpanzees at Bossou with highly desirable food commodities that may be traded for other currencies

Sex differences in the movement patterns of free-ranging chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii): foraging and border checking

Most social primates live in cohesive groups, so travel paths inevitably reflect compromise: decision processes of individuals are obscured. The fission-fusion social organisation of the chimpanzee, however, allows an individual’s movements to be investigated independently. We followed 15 chimpanzees (8 male and 7 female) through the relatively flat forest of Budongo, Uganda, plotting the path of each individual over periods of 1-3 days. Chimpanzee movement was parsed into phases ending with halts of more than 20 minutes, during which individuals fed, rested or engaged in social activities. Males, lactating or pregnant females, and sexually receptive females all travelled similar average distances between halts, at similar speeds, and along similarly direct beeline paths. Compared to lactating or pregnant females, males did travel for a significantly longer time each day and halted more often, but the most striking sex differences appeared in the organisation of movement phases into a day’s path. After a halt, males tended to continue in the same direction as before. Lactating or pregnant females showed no such strategy and often retraced the preceding phase, returning to previously visited food patches. We suggest that female chimpanzee movements approximate an optimal solution to feeding requirements, whereas the paths of males allow integration of foraging with territorial defence. The ‘continually moving forwards’ strategy of males enables them to monitor their territory boundaries – border checking – whilst foraging, generally avoiding the explicit boundary patrols observed at other chimpanzee study sites

MASTREE+ : time-series of plant reproductive effort from six continents

Significant gaps remain in understanding the response of plant reproduction to environmental change. This is partly because measuring reproduction in long-lived plants requires direct observation over many years and such datasets have rarely been made publicly available. Here we introduce MASTREE+, a data set that collates reproductive time-series data from across the globe and makes these data freely available to the community. MASTREE+ includes 73,828 georeferenced observations of annual reproduction (e.g. seed and fruit counts) in perennial plant populations worldwide. These observations consist of 5971 population-level time-series from 974 species in 66 countries. The mean and median time-series length is 12.4 and 10 years respectively, and the data set includes 1122 series that extend over at least two decades (≥20 years of observations). For a subset of well-studied species, MASTREE+ includes extensive replication of time-series across geographical and climatic gradients. Here we describe the open-access data set, available as a.csv file, and we introduce an associated web-based app for data exploration. MASTREE+ will provide the basis for improved understanding of the response of long-lived plant reproduction to environmental change. Additionally, MASTREE+ will enable investigation of the ecology and evolution of reproductive strategies in perennial plants, and the role of plant reproduction as a driver of ecosystem dynamics

The Steady State Great Ape? Long Term Isotopic Records Reveal the Effects of Season, Social Rank and Reproductive Status on Bonobo Feeding Behavior

Dietary ecology of extant great apes is known to respond to environmental conditions such as climate and food availability, but also to vary depending on social status and life history characteristics. Bonobos (Pan paniscus) live under comparatively steady ecological conditions in the evergreen rainforests of the Congo Basin. Bonobos are an ideal species for investigating influences of sociodemographic and physiological factors, such as female reproductive status, on diet. We investigate the long term dietary pattern in wild but fully habituated bonobos by stable isotope analysis in hair and integrating a variety of long-term sociodemographic information obtained through observations. We analyzed carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in 432 hair sections obtained from 101 non-invasively collected hair samples. These samples represented the dietary behavior of 23 adult bonobos from 2008 through 2010. By including isotope and crude protein data from plants we could establish an isotope baseline and interpret the results of several general linear mixed models using the predictors climate, sex, social rank, reproductive state of females, adult age and age of infants. We found that low canopy foliage is a useful isotopic tracer for tropical rainforest settings, and consumption of terrestrial herbs best explains the temporal isotope patterns we found in carbon isotope values of bonobo hair. Only the diet of male bonobos was affected by social rank, with lower nitrogen isotope values in low-ranking young males. Female isotope values mainly differed between different stages of reproduction (cycling, pregnancy, lactation). These isotopic differences appear to be related to changes in dietary preference during pregnancy (high protein diet) and lactation (high energy diet), which allow to compensate for different nutritional needs during maternal investment

Challenges for automatically extracting molecular interactions from full-text articles

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The increasing availability of full-text biomedical articles will allow more biomedical knowledge to be extracted automatically with greater reliability. However, most Information Retrieval (IR) and Extraction (IE) tools currently process only abstracts. The lack of corpora has limited the development of tools that are capable of exploiting the knowledge in full-text articles. As a result, there has been little investigation into the advantages of full-text document structure, and the challenges developers will face in processing full-text articles.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We manually annotated passages from full-text articles that describe interactions summarised in a Molecular Interaction Map (MIM). Our corpus tracks the process of identifying facts to form the MIM summaries and captures any factual dependencies that must be resolved to extract the fact completely. For example, a fact in the results section may require a synonym defined in the introduction. The passages are also annotated with negated and coreference expressions that must be resolved.</p> <p>We describe the guidelines for identifying relevant passages and possible dependencies. The corpus includes 2162 sentences from 78 full-text articles. Our corpus analysis demonstrates the necessity of full-text processing; identifies the article sections where interactions are most commonly stated; and quantifies the proportion of interaction statements requiring coherent dependencies. Further, it allows us to report on the relative importance of identifying synonyms and resolving negated expressions. We also experiment with an oracle sentence retrieval system using the corpus as a gold-standard evaluation set.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We introduce the MIM corpus, a unique resource that maps interaction facts in a MIM to annotated passages within full-text articles. It is an invaluable case study providing guidance to developers of biomedical IR and IE systems, and can be used as a gold-standard evaluation set for full-text IR tasks.</p