Designing marine fishery reserves using passive acoustic telemetry

Marine Fishery Reserves (MFRs) are being adopted, in part, as a strategy to replenish depleted fish stocks and serve as a source for recruits to adjacent fisheries. By necessity, their design must consider the biological parameters of the species under consideration to ensure that the spawning stock is conserved while simultaneously providing propagules for dispersal. We describe how acoustic telemetry can be employed to design effective MFRs by elucidating important life-history parameters of the species under consideration, including home range, and ecological preferences, including habitat utilization. We then designed a reserve based on these parameters using data from two acoustic telemetry studies that examined two closely-linked subpopulations of queen conch (Strombus gigas) at Conch Reef in the Florida Keys. The union of the home ranges of the individual conch (aggregation home range: AgHR) within each subpopulation was used to construct a shape delineating the area within which a conch would be located with a high probability. Together with habitat utilization information acquired during both the spawning and non-spawning seasons, as well as landscape features (i.e., corridors), we designed a 66.5 ha MFR to conserve the conch population. Consideration was also given for further expansion of the population into suitable habitats

Crises in the thrift industry and the cost of mortgage credit

Savings and loan associations ; Mortgages ; Interest rates

Natural Supergravity Inflation

We show that a single uncharged chiral superfield, canonically coupled to \mbox{$N=1$} supergravity with vanishing superpotential, naturally drives inflation in the early universe for a class of simple Kahler potentials. Inflation occurs due to the one-loop generation of a Kahler anomaly proportional to $\R^2$. The coefficient of this $\R^2$ term is of the correct magnitude to describe all aspects of an inflationary cosmology, including sufficient amplitude perturbations and reheating. Higher order terms proportional to $\R^n$ for $n \geq 3$ are naturally suppressed relative to the $\R^2$ term and, hence, do not destabilize the theory.Comment: 13 pages, CERN-TH.6685/92, UPR-0526

Dark-matter dynamical friction versus gravitational-wave emission in the evolution of compact-star binaries

The measured orbital period decay of compact-star binaries, with characteristic orbital periods $\sim 0.1$~days, is explained with very high precision by the gravitational wave (GW) emission of an inspiraling binary in vacuum. However, the binary gravitational binding energy is also affected by an usually neglected phenomenon, namely the dark matter dynamical friction (DMDF) produced by the interaction of the binary components with their respective DM gravitational wakes. The entity of this effect depends on the orbital period and on the local value of the DM density, hence on the position of the binary in the Galaxy. We evaluate the DMDF produced by three different DM profiles: the Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW), the non-singular-isothermal-sphere (NSIS) and the Ruffini-Arg\"uelles-Rueda (RAR) profile based on self-gravitating keV fermions. We first show that indeed, due to their Galactic position, the GW emission dominates over the DMDF in the NS-NS, NS-WD and WD-WD binaries for which measurements of the orbital decay exist. Then, we evaluate the conditions under which the effect of DMDF on the binary evolution becomes comparable to, or overcomes, the one of the GW emission. We find that, for instance for $1.3$--$0.2$ $M_\odot$ NS-WD, $1.3$--$1.3$~$M_\odot$ NS-NS, and $0.25$--$0.50$~$M_\odot$ WD-WD, located at 0.1~kpc, this occurs at orbital periods around 20--30 days in a NFW profile while, in a RAR profile, it occurs at about 100 days. For closer distances to the Galactic center, the DMDF effect increases and the above critical orbital periods become interestingly shorter. Finally, we also analyze the system parameters for which DMDF leads to an orbital widening instead of orbital decay. All the above imply that a direct/indirect observational verification of this effect in compact-star binaries might put strong constraints on the nature of DM and its Galactic distribution.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D, 201

Airborne Fraunhofer Line Discriminator

Airborne Fraunhofer Line Discriminator enables prospecting for fluorescent materials, hydrography with fluorescent dyes, and plant studies based on fluorescence of chlorophyll. Optical unit design is the coincidence of Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum occurring at the characteristic wavelengths of some fluorescent materials