Trade-offs, condition dependence and stopover site selection by migrating sandpipers

Western sandpipers Calidris mauri on southward migration fly over the Gulf of Alaska to the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, where they stop for a few days to replenish reserves before continuing. In the Strait, individuals captured on the extensive tidal mudflats of the Fraser estuary (∼25000 ha) are significantly heavier (2.71 g, or >10% of lean body mass) than those captured on the small (<100 ha) mudflat of nearby Sidney Island. Previous work has shown that the difference cannot be attributed to seasonal timing, size, age or gender effects, and here we compare predictions made by six hypotheses about a diverse set of data to explain why, partway through a migratory journey of ∼10000 km, birds have such different body masses at two stopover sites within 40 km of each other. The ‘trade-off’ hypothesis – that the large Fraser estuary offers safety from predators, but a lower fattening rate, while the small Sidney Island site is more dangerous, but offers a higher fattening rate – made six successful predictions, all of which were upheld by the data. All other hypotheses failed at least one prediction. We infer that calidrid sandpipers arriving in the Strait of Georgia with little fat remaining (and therefore low body mass) choose to take advantage of the high feeding rate at small sites like Sidney Island because they are less vulnerable to avian predators than are individuals with higher fat reserves, who instead elect to feed at large open sites like the Fraser estuary mudflats

Dispersie na het broedseizoen, trek en overwintering van Grote Sterns <i>Thalasseus sandvicensis</i> uit de Voordelta = Post-breeding dispersal, migration and wintering of Sandwich Terns <i>Thalasseus sandvicensis</i> from the southwestern part of the Netherlands

The Sandwich Tern Sterna sandvicensis is a Dutch Red List species with a population of 19,000 pairs in the Dutch coastal zone. It winters off the coasts of Africa and a small populations migrates into the Mediterranean or stays even more north.. In the Netherlands, breeding takes places in a small number of colonies in the Delta area and the Waddensea. In this study, Sandwich Terns from the Delta colony on the Scheelhoek (Natura 2000 SPA ‘Haringvliet’) were investigated which forage during the breeding season in Natura 2000 SPA ‘Voordelta’. In total 30 adult Sandwich Terns were equipped with radio transmitters, a colourring and a plumage colour (picrinic acid or silver nitrate solution). Thanks to these markings birds could be followed in the colonies, from airplanes and from the coast. Several birds used the sand banks off the coast of their breeding colonies to rest after the breeding season. After a short while they dispersed in western and northern direction with sightings in the northern part of the Netherlands (outside and within other colonies). These were always failed breeders, possibly scouting other colonies for future breeding places. Some of these birds even left the Dutch coasts and appeared in Scotland and Denmark. Adults with young probably dispersed into the North Sea after a short stay around the sand banks off the coast near the colonies. They probably head to more nutrient rich areas in the North Sea and adjacent areas where the young birds can practice their fishing techniques before they move south. The adults can build-up here good fat reserves before the start of migration. In September, most of the marked Sandwich Terns were south of their breeding places and during their southward migration birds were seen along the coast of France and on Lanzarote (Canary Islands). Our results showed that using markers on birds could yield good data with a resighting percentage of 20% within only one year. Furthermore, the use of plumage colouring proved to be a good method for obtaining information of individual birds as these colourings attract the attention of observers and are ‘readable’ over large distances

The Fractal Properties of the Source and BEC

Using simple space-time implementation of the random cascade model we investigate numerically influence of the possible fractal structure of the emitting source on Bose-Einstein correlations between identical particles. The results are then discussed in terms of the non-extensive Tsallis statistics.Comment: LaTeX file and 2 PS files with figures, 8 pages altogether. Talk presented at the 12th Indian Summer School "Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics, Prague, Czech Republic, 30 August-3 Sept. 1999; to be published in Czech J. Phys. (1999). Some typos correcte

Dissociative paraplegia after epidural anesthesia: A case report

10.1186/1752-1947-7-56Journal of Medical Case Reports7

Coarse grained approach for volume conserving models

Volume conserving surface (VCS) models without deposition and evaporation, as well as ideal molecular-beam epitaxy models, are prototypes to study the symmetries of conserved dynamics. In this work we study two similar VCS models with conserved noise, which differ from each other by the axial symmetry of their dynamic hopping rules. We use a coarse-grained approach to analyze the models and show how to determine the coefficients of their corresponding continuous stochastic differential equation (SDE) within the same universality class. The employed method makes use of small translations in a test space which contains the stationary probability density function (SPDF). In case of the symmetric model we calculate all the coarse-grained coefficients of the related conserved Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation. With respect to the symmetric model, the asymmetric model adds new terms which have to be analyzed, first of all the diffusion term, whose coarse-grained coefficient can be determined by the same method. In contrast to other methods, the used formalism allows to calculate all coefficients of the SDE theoretically and within limits numerically. Above all, the used approach connects the coefficients of the SDE with the SPDF and hence gives them a precise physical meaning.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

On the extrapolation to ITER of discharges in present tokamaks

An expression for the extrapolated fusion gain G = Pfusion /5 Pheat (Pfusion being the total fusion power and Pheat the total heating power) of ITER in terms of the confinement improvement factor (H) and the normalised beta (betaN) is derived in this paper. It is shown that an increase in normalised beta can be expected to have a negative or neutral influence on G depending on the chosen confinement scaling law. Figures of merit like H betaN / q95^2 should be used with care, since large values of this quantity do not guarantee high values of G, and might not be attainable with the heating power installed on ITER.Comment: 6 Pages, 3 figures, Submitted to Nuclear Fusion on the 29th of November 200

Width of Sunspot Generating Zone and Reconstruction of Butterfly Diagram

Based on the extended Greenwich-NOAA/USAF catalogue of sunspot groups it is demonstrated that the parameters describing the latitudinal width of the sunspot generating zone (SGZ) are closely related to the current level of solar activity, and the growth of the activity leads to the expansion of SGZ. The ratio of the sunspot number to the width of SGZ shows saturation at a certain level of the sunspot number, and above this level the increase of the activity takes place mostly due to the expansion of SGZ. It is shown that the mean latitudes of sunspots can be reconstructed from the amplitudes of solar activity. Using the obtained relations and the group sunspot numbers by Hoyt and Schatten (1998), the latitude distribution of sunspot groups ("the Maunder butterfly diagram") for the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries is reconstructed and compared with historical sunspot observations.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures; accepted by Solar Physics; the final publication will be available at www.springerlink.co

Spontaneous Magnetization and Electron Momentum Density in 3D Quantum Dots

We discuss an exactly solvable model Hamiltonian for describing the interacting electron gas in a quantum dot. Results for a spherical square well confining potential are presented. The ground state is found to exhibit striking oscillations in spin polarization with dot radius at a fixed electron density. These oscillations are shown to induce characteristic signatures in the momentum density of the electron gas, providing a novel route for direct experimental observation of the dot magnetization via spectroscopies sensitive to the electron momentum density.Comment: 5 pages (Revtex4), 4 (eps) figure

Biharmonic pattern selection

A new model to describe fractal growth is discussed which includes effects due to long-range coupling between displacements $u$. The model is based on the biharmonic equation $\nabla^{4}u =0$ in two-dimensional isotropic defect-free media as follows from the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation for pattern formation -or, alternatively, from the theory of elasticity. As a difference with Laplacian and Poisson growth models, in the new model the Laplacian of $u$ is neither zero nor proportional to $u$. Its discretization allows to reproduce a transition from dense to multibranched growth at a point in which the growth velocity exhibits a minimum similarly to what occurs within Poisson growth in planar geometry. Furthermore, in circular geometry the transition point is estimated for the simplest case from the relation $r_{\ell}\approx L/e^{1/2}$ such that the trajectories become stable at the growing surfaces in a continuous limit. Hence, within the biharmonic growth model, this transition depends only on the system size $L$ and occurs approximately at a distance $60 \%$ far from a central seed particle. The influence of biharmonic patterns on the growth probability for each lattice site is also analysed.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev. E. Copies upon request to [email protected]