Oregon's nutria problem

The nutria or coypu, Myocastor coypus, is a large semi-aquatic rodent that superficially resembles an overgrown muskrat or a stunted beaver. They were introduced into Oregon from about 1930 to the 1950's. At one time Oregon had more than 600 fur farmers raising these animals for fur; now there are none. Some animals escaped and many others were released into the wild when it became apparent that pelt values were nonexistent and production costs greatly exceeded profits. Being prolific and quite mobile, the nutria quickly spread through much of western Oregon. By the 1960's damage to agricultural crops was common to severe in western Oregon. Crops damaged included seed, grain, forage, hay and trees. Burrowing damage to stream banks, field borders, and farm ponds was reported in many areas. Growth and reproduction data for Oregon nutria are included. Methods for controlling feral nutria including the use of prolin, red squill, strychnine alkaloid, and zinc phosphide are reported. Fur trapping and adverse weather as factors in population reduction are discussed

Spin Structure of the Nucleon - Status and Recent Results

After the initial discovery of the so-called "spin crisis in the parton model" in the 1980's, a large set of polarization data in deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering was collected at labs like SLAC, DESY and CERN. More recently, new high precision data at large x and in the resonance region have come from experiments at Jefferson Lab. These data, in combination with the earlier ones, allow us to study in detail the polarized parton densities, the Q^2 dependence of various moments of spin structure functions, the duality between deep inelastic and resonance data, and the nucleon structure in the valence quark region. Together with complementary data from HERMES, RHIC and COMPASS, we can put new limits on the flavor decomposition and the gluon contribution to the nucleon spin. In this report, we provide an overview of our present knowledge of the nucleon spin structure and give an outlook on future experiments. We focus in particular on the spin structure functions g_1 and g_2 of the nucleon and their moments.Comment: 69 pages, 46 figures. Report to be published in "Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics". v2 with added references and minor edit