Search results for "Body"

Size does matter — the eco-evolutionary effects of changing body size in fish

2020

Body size acts as a proxy for many fitness-related traits. Body size is also subject to directional selection from various anthropogenic stressors such as increasing water temperature, decreasing dissolved oxygen, fisheries, as well as natural predators. Changes in individual body size correlate with changes in fecundity, behaviour, and survival and can propagate through populations and ecosystems by truncating age and size structures and changing predator–prey dynamics. In this review, we will explore the causes and consequences of changing body size in fish in the light of recent literature and relevant theories. We will investigate the central role of body size in ecology by first discu…

Experimental size-selective harvesting affects behavioral types of a social fish

2019

In most fisheries, larger fish experience substantially higher mortality than smaller fish. Body length, life history, and behavioral traits are often correlated, such that fisheries-induced changes in size or life history can also alter behavioral traits. However, empirical evidence regarding how size-selective harvesting alters the evolution of behavioral traits in exploited stocks is scarce. We used experimental lines of Zebrafish Danio rerio that were exposed to positively size-selective, negatively size-selective, or random harvest over five generations. Our aim was to investigate whether simulated fishing changed the mean personality of the surviving females five generations after ini…

Growth sites of polypores from quantitative expert evaluation: Late-stage decayers and saprotrophs fruit closer to ground

2017

Abstract Life history traits are key to why species occur when and where they do and how their populations will respond to environmental changes. However, dispersal-related traits of fungi are generally poorly known. We studied how spore release height from the ground, an important determinant of airborne dispersal, is connected to other traits in polypores. We collected expert evaluations of fruit body growth sites for 140 species and found that experts generally provided consistent estimates of height above the ground. Height was correlated with other traits: species fruiting on living trees, earlier decay stages and deciduous hosts tend to fruit higher above the ground. While our data do…

Why aren't warning signals everywhere? : On the prevalence of aposematism and mimicry in communities

2021

Warning signals are a striking example of natural selection present in almost every ecological community - from Nordic meadows to tropical rainforests, defended prey species and their mimics ward off potential predators before they attack. Yet despite the wide distribution of warning signals, they are relatively scarce as a proportion of the total prey available, and more so in some biomes than others. Classically, warning signals are thought to be governed by positive density-dependent selection, i.e. they succeed better when they are more common. Therefore, after surmounting this initial barrier to their evolution, it is puzzling that they remain uncommon on the scale of the community. He…

Species interactions, environmental gradients and body size shape population niche width

2021

1. Competition for shared resources is commonly assumed to restrict population-level niche width of coexisting species. However, the identity and abundance of coexisting species, the prevailing environmental conditions, and the individual body size may shape the effects of interspecific interactions on species’ niche width. 2. Here we study the effects of interspecific and intraspecific interactions, lake area and altitude, and fish body size on the trophic niche width and resource use of a generalist predator, the littoral-dwelling large, sparsely rakered morph of European whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus; hereafter LSR whitefish). We use stable isotope, diet and survey fishing data from 14 …

Identification and control design for path tracking of hydraulic loader crane

2017

The controlled operation of hydraulic machines with multiple degrees of freedom is challenging due to complex nonlinear dynamics of cylinder actuators, in addition to multibody dynamics like in the case of hydraulic manipulators. This paper addresses the system identification and control design for path tracking of a standard hydraulic loader crane. The kinematics of the crane is solved for operation in the vertical plane and generation of trajectories for the tool tip to be followed. A frequency response measurements and analysis have been done for dynamics modeling of both hydraulic cylinders actuating main boom and jib. The static dead-zone type input non-linearity has been identified an…

Feasibility study of electromechanical cylinder drivetrain for offshore mechatronic systems

2017

Currently, there is an increasing focus on the environmental impact and energy consumption of the oil and gas industry. In offshore drilling equipment, electric motors tend to replace traditionally used hydraulic motors, especially in rotational motion control applications. However, force densities available from linear hydraulic actuators are still typically higher than those of electric actuators. Therefore, usually the remaining source of hydraulic power is thereby the hydraulic cylinder. This paper presents a feasibility study on the implementation of an electromechanical cylinder drivetrain on an offshore vertical pipe handling machine. The scope of this paper is to investigate the fea…

Collision detection for 3D rigid body motion planning with narrow passages

2017

In sampling-based 3D rigid body motion planning one of the major subroutines is collision detection. Especially for problems with narrow passages many samples have to be checked by a collision detection algorithm. In this application, the runtime of the motion planning algorithm is dominated by collision detection and the samples have the very specific characteristic that many of them are in collision and have small penetration volumes. In our work, we introduce a data structure and an algorithm that makes use of this characteristic by combining well-known data structures like a distance field and an octree with the swap algorithm by Llanas et al. For 3D rigid body motion planning with narr…

Care Workers’ Readiness for Robotization : Identifying Psychological and Socio-Demographic Determinants

2020

Successful implementation of robots in welfare services requires that the staff approves of them as a part of daily work tasks. In this study, we identified psychological and socio-demographic determinants associated with readiness for robotization among professional Finnish care-workers. National survey data were collected from professional care workers (n = 3800) between October and November 2016. Random samples were drawn from the member registers of two Finnish trade unions. The data were analyzed with regression models for respondents with and without firsthand experience with robots. The models explained 34–39% of the variance in the readiness for robotization. The readiness was posit…

2020

Decreases in aerobic fitness during military operations have been observed in several studies. Thus, differences in training adaptations during a 6-month crisis-management operation were compared by using the change in endurance performance as the outcome measure. Sixty-six male soldiers volunteered for the study, consisting of pre–post assessments of blood biomarkers, body composition, physical performance, and the military simulation test (MST) performance. Physical training volume was self-reported. After the follow-up, the data were divided based on individual changes in endurance performance. Endurance performance was improved in the high-responder group (HiR, n = 25) and maintained or…