Search results for " coevolution"

Ant Societies Buffer Individual-Level Effects of Parasite Infections

2012

Parasites decrease host fitness and can induce changes in host behavior, morphology, and physiology. When parasites exploit social insects, they influence not only infected individuals but also the society as a whole. Workers of the ant Temnothorax nylanderi are an intermediate host for the cestode Anomotaenia brevis. We studied a heavily parasitized population and found that, although parasite infection had strong and diverse consequences for individual workers, colony fitness remained unchanged. At the individual level, we uncovered differences among the three worker types, infected and healthy workers from parasitized colonies and healthy workers from nonparasitized colonies. Infected wo…

Male reproductive senescence as a potential source of sexual conflict in a beetle

2011

The link between senescence and reproductive success is a contentious yet crucial issue to our understanding of mate choice, sexual conflict, and the evolution of ageing. By imposing direct (i.e., male fertility) or indirect (i.e., zygote viability) reproductive costs to females, male senescence may lead to sexual conflict at different levels. For example, ageing may affect male ability to deliver sperm, thus setting the scene for sexual conflict over mating, and/or may affect the quality of individual sperm cells, generating the potential for sexual conflict over fertilizing strategies. We addressed these issues by studying the mating behavior, reproductive fitness, and fertilization patte…

Soil aggregates and humus systems

2016

The European Society for Soil Conservation Conference, organized by the Babes-Bolyai University will take place from 15th June to the 18th June 2016 at the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The conference will cover areas like Soils – Our Common Future” stresses the vital interconnection between soil and life, as well as its importance for the future of the human society.; International audience; The survey of few main morphological soil aggregates (with intrinsic biological, chemical and physical contents) reveals the existence of different humus systems. Recognizable by naked eyes in the field, each humus system is confined in an ecological frame (climate, ve…

Dazzled and confused? Habituation and sensitization in free-living Yellow Warblers

2004

Cowbird versus cuckoo hosts: a comparative study of learned nest defense

2005

One of the best example of coevolutionaru adaptations is that of the interactions between avian brood parasites and their hosts. Brood parasites lay their eggs in nests of other specieis and leave the job of caring for their young with the hosts. Hosts of brood parasites tend to suffer high reproductive costs as often they raise few of no young of their own, an effect of being parasitizes. For this reason, many hosts have evolved strategies that reduces the cost of parasitism.

Mechanisms of refinement of avian nest defence behaviour

2003

Individual learning in the refinement of nest defence responses of the Yellow Warbler (Dendroica petechia)

2006

A Cooperative Coevolution Framework for Parallel Learning to Rank

2015

We propose CCRank, the first parallel framework for learning to rank based on evolutionary algorithms (EA), aiming to significantly improve learning efficiency while maintaining accuracy. CCRank is based on cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer framework that has demonstrated high promise in function optimization for problems with large search space and complex structures. Moreover, CC naturally allows parallelization of sub-solutions to the decomposed sub-problems, which can substantially boost learning efficiency. With CCRank, we investigate parallel CC in the context of learning to rank. We implement CCRank with three EA-based learning to rank algorithms for demonstration. E…