Search results for "eläin"

Aposematism facilitates the diversification of parental care strategies in poison frogs

2021

AbstractMany organisms have evolved adaptations to increase the odds of survival of their offspring. Parental care has evolved several times in animals including ectotherms. In amphibians, ~ 10% of species exhibit parental care. Among these, poison frogs (Dendrobatidae) are well-known for their extensive care, which includes egg guarding, larval transport, and specialized tadpole provisioning with trophic eggs. At least one third of dendrobatids displaying aposematism by exhibiting warning coloration that informs potential predators about the presence of defensive skin toxins. Aposematism has a central role in poison frog diversification, including diet specialization, and visual and acoust…

Artificial selection for predatory behaviour results in dietary niche differentiation in an omnivorous mammal

2022

The diet of an individual is a result of the availability of dietary items and the individual's foraging skills and preferences. Behavioural differences may thus influence diet variation, but the evolvability of diet choice through behavioural evolution has not been studied. We used experimental evolution combined with a field enclosure experiment to test whether behavioural selection leads to dietary divergence. We analysed the individual dietary niche via stable isotope ratios of nitrogen ( δ 15 N) and carbon ( δ 13 C) in the hair of an omnivorous mammal, the bank vole, from four lines selected for predatory behaviour and four unselected control lines. Predatory voles had higher hair δ 1…

A Successful Crowdsourcing Approach for Bird Sound Classification

2023

Automated recorders are increasingly used in remote sensing of wildlife, yet automated methods of processing the audio remains challenging. Identifying animal sounds with machine learning provides a solution, but optimizing the models requires annotated training data. Producing such data can require much manual effort, which could be alleviated by engaging masses to contribute to research and share the workload. Birdwatchers are experts on identifying bird vocalizations and form an ideal focal audience for a citizen science project aiming for the required multitudes of annotated avian audio data. For this purpose, we launched a web portal that was targeted and advertised to Finnish birdwatc…

Social information use by predators : expanding the information ecology of prey defences

2022

Social information use is well documented across the animal kingdom, but how it influences ecological and evolutionary processes is only just beginning to be investigated. Here we evaluate how social transmission may influence species interactions and potentially change or create novel selection pressures by focusing on predator-prey interactions, one of the best studied examples of species coevolution. There is extensive research into how prey can use social information to avoid predators, but little synthesis of how social transmission among predators can influence the outcome of different stages of predation. Here we review evidence that predators use social information during 1) encount…

A hexavalent Coxsackievirus B vaccine is highly immunogenic and has a strong protective capacity in mice and nonhuman primates

2020

A proof-of-concept study shows the generation of an immunogenic hexavalent Coxsackie B virus vaccine that prevents disease.

Sex roles and sex ratios in animals

2022

In species with separate sexes, females and males often differ in their morphology, physiology and behaviour. Such sex-specific traits are functionally linked to variation in reproductive competition, mate choice and parental care, which have all been linked to sex roles. At the 150th anniversary of Darwin's theory on sexual selection, the question of why patterns of sex roles vary within and across species remains a key topic in behavioural and evolutionary ecology. New theoretical, experimental and comparative evidence suggests that variation in the adult sex ratio (ASR) is a key driver of variation in sex roles. Here, we first define and discuss the historical emergence of the sex role c…

DNA sequence baits targeting ultra-conserved elements in marine invertebrates

2022

This dataset includes four files of DNA sequence baits targeted to ultra-conserved elements (UCEs) identified from four different taxonomic groups of marine invertebrates: Annelida, Bivalvia, Gastropoda and Crustacea. UCE loci are genomic regions of high conservation that can be found throughout the genomes that can be extracted from the genome and sequenced for use in phylogenetic, phylogeographic and population genetic analyses. The UCE loci were located by aligning a minimum of five species’ genomes to a base genome in each taxonomic group and searching for overlapping highly conserved areas. The UCE baits were designed with screening coverage of 4X using the pipeline phyluce v. 1.6.6 (h…

Increasing intensity of deimatic behaviour in response to repeated simulated attacks: a case study on the mountain katydid (Acripeza reticulata)

2022

Abstract How and when deimatic behaviours are performed can change during encounters between predators and prey. Some predators attack repeatedly, investigating and manipulating prey, and in response, an individual’s deimatic behaviour may intensify or may diminish in favour of escaping. The presence of a resource can further force a trade-off between displaying and escaping. Here, we examined the intensity of the katydid’s deimatic behaviour, a visual display, the propensity of their escape response under repeated simulated attacks, and how these responses change in the presence of foraging resources. We found that display intensity increased with repeated simulated attacks and that femal…

"Metisiltä mättäiltä Otavaisen olkapäille" : sosiologinen tutkielma karhun kulttuurihistoriasta

2000

Domain‐specific neural networks improve automated bird sound recognition already with small amount of local data

2022

1. An automatic bird sound recognition system is a useful tool for collecting data of different bird species for ecological analysis. Together with autonomous recording units (ARUs), such a system provides a possibility to collect bird observations on a scale that no human observer could ever match. During the last decades, progress has been made in the field of automatic bird sound recognition, but recognizing bird species from untargeted soundscape recordings remains a challenge. 2. In this article, we demonstrate the workflow for building a global identification model and adjusting it to perform well on the data of autonomous recorders from a specific region. We show how data augmentatio…