Browsing Biology ePrints by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 44
-
Alarm calls as costly signals of anti-predator vigilance: The Watchful Babbler game
(Academic Press LTD Elsevier Science LTD, 2001)Alarm-calling behavior is common in many species that suffer from predation. While kin selection or reciprocal altruism are typically invoked to explain such behaviors, several authors have conjectured that some alarm calls ... -
Bacteria are different: Observations, interpretations, speculations, and opinions about the mechanisms of adaptive evolution in prokaryotes
(National Academy of the Sciences, 2000-06-20)To some extent, the genetical theory of adaptive evolution in bacteria is a simple extension of that developed for sexually reproducing eukaryotes. In other, fundamental, ways the process of adaptive evolution in bacteria ... -
Behavioral Drive versus Behavioral Inertia in Evolution: A Null Model Approach
(University of Chicago Press, 2003-03)Some biologists embrace the classical view that changes in behavior inevitably initiate or drive evolutionary changes in other traits, yet others note that behavior sometimes inhibits evolutionary changes. Here we develop ... -
Behavioral thermoregulation in lizards: importance of associated costs
(American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1974-05-31)The Puerto Rican lizard Anolis cristatellus behaviorally regulates body temperature in an open habitat but passively tolerates lower and more variable temperatures in an adjacent forest where basking sites are few and ... -
Chloroplast genome sequencing analysis of Heterosigma akashiwo CCMP452 (West Atlantic) and NIES293 (West Pacific) strains
(2008)Background: Heterokont algae form a monophyletic group within the stramenopile branch of the tree of life. These organisms display wide morphological diversity, ranging from minute unicells to massive, bladed forms. ... -
Complex regulation and multiple developmental functions of misfire, the Drosophila melanogaster ferlin gene
(2007-03-26)Background: Ferlins are membrane proteins with multiple C2 domains and proposed functions in Ca2+ mediated membrane-membrane interactions in animals. Caenorhabditis elegans has two ferlin genes, one of which is required ... -
Cost and conflict in animal signals and human language
(National Academy of Sciences USA, 2001-11-06)The "costly signalling" hypothesis proposes that animal signals are kept honest by appropriate signal costs. We show that to the contrary, signal cost is unnecessary for honest signalling even when interests conflict. We ... -
The costs and benefits of library site licenses to academic journals
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 2004)Scientific publishing is rapidly shifting from a paper-based system to one of predominantly electronic distribution, in which universities purchase site licenses for online access to journal contents. Will these changes ... -
The disadvantage of combinatorial communication
(The Royal Society of London, 2004)Combinatorial communication allows rapid and efficient transfer of detailed information, yet combinatorial communication is used by few, if any, non-human species. To complement recent studies illustrating the advantages ... -
Does Mother Nature Punish Rotten Kids?
(Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999)The theory of parent-offspring conflict predicts that mothers and their offspring may not agree about how resources should be allocated among family members. An offspring, for example, may favor a later weaning date than ... -
Ecological consequences of foraging mode
(Ecological Society of America, 1981-08)Desert lizards are typically either widely foraging or sit-and-wait predators, and these foraging modes are correlated with major differences in ecology. Foraging mode is related to the type of prey eaten by lizards. Widely ... -
Ecological theory suggests that antimicrobial cycling will not reduce antimicrobial resistance in hospitals
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 2004)Hospital-acquired infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose a grave and growing threat to public health. Antimicrobial cycling, in which two or more antibiotic classes are alternated on a time scale of months ... -
Effect of human leukocyte antigen heterozygosity on infectious disease outcome: the need for allele-specific measures
(Biomed Central, 2003-01-24)Background: Doherty and Zinkernagel, who discovered that antigen presentation is restricted by the major histocompatibility complex (MHC, called HLA in humans), hypothesized that individuals heterozygous at particular MHC ... -
Effect of human leukocyte antigen heterozygosity on infectious disease outcome: The need for allele-specific measures
(2003)Background: Doherty and Zinkernagel, who discovered that antigen presentation is restricted by the major histocompatibility complex (MHC, called HLA in humans), hypothesized that individuals heterozygous at particular MHC ... -
Epidemiology of antibiotic resistance in hospitals: paradoxes and prescriptions
(National Academy of Sciences, 2000-02-15)A simple mathematical model of bacterial transmission within a hospital was used to study the effects of measures to control nosocomial transmission of bacteria and reduce antimicrobial resistance in nosocomial pathogens. ... -
Evaluating temperature regulation by field-active ectotherms: the fallacy of the inappropriate question
(University of Chicago, 1993-11)We describe a research protocol for evaluating temperature regulation from data on small field-active ectothermic animals, especially lizards. The protocol requires data on body temperatures (Tb) of field-active ectotherms, ... -
Evolution of Mutator Genes in Bacterial Populations: The Roles of Environmental Change and Timing
(Genetics Society of America, 2003-07)Recent studies have found high frequencies of bacteria with increased genomic rates of mutation in both clinical and laboratory populations. These observations may seem surprising in light of earlier experimental and ... -
Germline bottlenecks and the evolutionary maintenance of mitochondrial genomes
(Genetics, 1998-08)Several features of the biology of mitochondria suggest that mitochondria might be susceptible to Muller’s ratchet and other forms of evolutionary degradation: Mitochondria have predominantly uniparental inheritance, appear ... -
Hot rocks and not-so-hot rocks: retreat-site selection by garter snakes and its thermal consequences
(Ecological Society of America, 1989-08)Studies of behavioral thermoregulation of ectotherms have typically focused only on active animals. However, most temperate-zone ectotherms actually spend more time sequestered in retreats (e.g., under rocks) than active ... -
How often do lizards "run on empty"?
(Ecological Society of America, 2001-01)Energy balance is relevant to diverse issues in ecology, physiology, and evolution. To determine whether lizards are generally in positive energy balance, we synthesized a massive data set on the proportion of individual ...