The evolution of democratic peace in animal societies.

A major goal in evolutionary biology is to elucidate common principles that drive human and other animal societies to adopt either a warlike or peaceful nature. One proposed explanation for the variation in aggression between human societies is the democratic peace hypothesis. According to this theory, autocracies are more warlike than democracies because autocratic leaders can pursue fights for private gain.

Computer vision for plant pathology: A review with examples from cocoa agriculture.

Plant pathogens can decimate crops and render the local cultivation of a species unprofitable. In extreme cases this has caused famine and economic collapse. Timing is vital in treating crop diseases, and the use of computer vision for precise disease detection and timing of pesticide application is gaining popularity.

The evolution of menopause in toothed whales.

Understanding how and why menopause has evolved is a long-standing challenge across disciplines. Females can typically maximize their reproductive success by reproducing for the whole of their adult life. In humans, however, women cease reproduction several decades before the end of their natural lifespan.

BISoN: A Bayesian Framework for Inference of Social Networks.

Animal social networks are often constructed from point estimates of edge weights. In many contexts, edge weights are inferred from observational data, and the uncertainty around estimates can be affected by various factors. Though this has been acknowledged in previous work, methods that explicitly quantify uncertainty in edge weights have not yet been widely adopted, and remain undeveloped for many common types of data.

Postreproductive female killer whales reduce socially inflicted injuries in their male offspring.

Understanding the evolution of menopause presents a long-standing scientific challenge-why should females cease ovulation prior to the end of their natural lifespan? In human societies, intergenerational resource transfers, for example, food sharing and caregiving, are thought to have played a key role in the evolution of menopause, providing a pathway by which postreproductive females can boost the fitness of their kin. To date however, other late-life contributions that postreproductive females may provide their kin have not been well studied. Here, we test the hypothesis that postreproductive female resident killer whales (Orcinus orca) provide social support to their offspring by reducing the socially inflicted injuries they experience.

Temporal dynamics of mother-offspring relationships in Bigg's killer whales: opportunities for kin-directed help by post-reproductive females.

Age-related changes in the patterns of local relatedness (kinship dynamics) can be a significant selective force shaping the evolution of life history and social behaviour. In humans and some species of toothed whales, average female relatedness increases with age, which can select for a prolonged post-reproductive lifespan in older females due to both costs of reproductive conflict and benefits of late-life helping of kin. Killer whales () provide a valuable system for exploring social dynamics related to such costs and benefits in a mammal with an extended post-reproductive female lifespan.

Formulation Controls the Potential Neuromuscular Toxicity of Polyethylene Photoproducts in Developing Zebrafish.

Sunlight transforms plastic into water-soluble products, the potential toxicity of which remains unresolved, particularly for vertebrate animals. We evaluated acute toxicity and gene expression in developing zebrafish larvae after 5 days of exposure to photoproduced (P) and dark (D) leachates from additive-free polyethylene (PE) film and consumer-grade, additive-containing, conventional, and recycled PE bags. Using a "worst-case" scenario, with plastic concentrations exceeding those found in natural waters, we observed no acute toxicity.

Costly lifetime maternal investment in killer whales.

Parents often sacrifice their own future reproductive success to boost the survival of their offspring, a phenomenon referred to as parental investment. In several social mammals, mothers continue to improve the survival of their offspring well into adulthood; however, whether this extended care comes at a reproductive costs to mothers, and therefore represents maternal investment, is not well understood. We tested whether lifetime maternal care is a form of parental investment in fish-eating "resident" killer whales.

Common permutation methods in animal social network analysis do not control for non-independence.

Unlabelled: The non-independence of social network data is a cause for concern among behavioural ecologists conducting social network analysis. This has led to the adoption of several permutation-based methods for testing common hypotheses. One of the most common types of analysis is nodal regression, where the relationships between node-level network metrics and nodal covariates are analysed using a permutation technique known as node-label permutations.

Identification of environmental factors that promote intestinal inflammation.

Genome-wide association studies have identified risk loci linked to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)-a complex chronic inflammatory disorder of the gastrointestinal tract. The increasing prevalence of IBD in industrialized countries and the augmented disease risk observed in migrants who move into areas of higher disease prevalence suggest that environmental factors are also important determinants of IBD susceptibility and severity. However, the identification of environmental factors relevant to IBD and the mechanisms by which they influence disease has been hampered by the lack of platforms for their systematic investigation.

Patterns and consequences of age-linked change in local relatedness in animal societies.

The ultimate payoff of behaviours depends not only on their direct impact on an individual, but also on the impact on their relatives. Local relatedness-the average relatedness of an individual to their social environment-therefore has profound effects on social and life history evolution. Recent work has begun to show that local relatedness has the potential to change systematically over an individual's lifetime, a process called kinship dynamics.

Left cheek sclerosing rhabdomyosarcoma and development of isolated free flap donor site metastasis.

Rhabdomyosarcoma is a rare mesenchymal malignancy with four different morphological subtypes: alveolar, embryonal, pleomorphic and spindle cell/sclerosing. It is the most common soft tissue sarcoma of children and adolescents but occurs less commonly in adults. We describe a male patient in his 20s with sclerosing rhabdomyosarcoma of the left cheek who developed an isolated free flap donor site metastasis in the first instance but subsequently progressed with bilateral pulmonary metastases.

Leaders of war: modelling the evolution of conflict among heterogeneous groups.

War, in human and animal societies, can be extremely costly but can also offer significant benefits to the victorious group. We might expect groups to go into battle when the potential benefits of victory () outweigh the costs of escalated conflict (); however, and are unlikely to be distributed evenly in heterogeneous groups. For example, some leaders who make the decision to go to war may monopolize the benefits at little cost to themselves ('exploitative' leaders).

Kinship dynamics: patterns and consequences of changes in local relatedness.

Mounting evidence suggests that patterns of local relatedness can change over time in predictable ways, a process termed kinship dynamics. Kinship dynamics may occur at the level of the population or social group, where the mean relatedness across all members of the population or group changes over time, or at the level of the individual, where an individual's relatedness to its local group changes with age. Kinship dynamics are likely to have fundamental consequences for the evolution of social behaviour and life history because they alter the inclusive fitness payoffs to actions taken at different points in time.

A long postreproductive life span is a shared trait among genetically distinct killer whale populations.

The extended female postreproductive life span found in humans and some toothed whales remains an evolutionary puzzle. Theory predicts demographic patterns resulting in increased female relatedness with age (kinship dynamics) can select for a prolonged postreproductive life span due to the combined costs of intergenerational reproductive conflict and benefits of late-life helping. Here, we test this prediction using >40 years of longitudinal demographic data from the sympatric yet genetically distinct killer whale ecotypes: resident and Bigg's killer whales.

Age and sex influence social interactions, but not associations, within a killer whale pod.

Social structure is a fundamental aspect of animal populations. In order to understand the function and evolution of animal societies, it is important to quantify how individual attributes, such as age and sex, shape social relationships. Detecting these influences in wild populations under natural conditions can be challenging, especially when social interactions are difficult to observe and broad-scale measures of association are used as a proxy.

Tailings facility disclosures reveal stability risks.

Tailings facility failures represent a significant risk to the environment and communities globally, but until now little data was available on the global distribution of risks and characteristics of facilities to ensure proper governance. We conducted a survey and compiled a database with information on tailings facilities disclosed by extractive companies at the request of institutional investors. Despite limitations in the data, this information disclosure request represents the most comprehensive survey of tailings facilities ever undertaken.

Common datastream permutations of animal social network data are not appropriate for hypothesis testing using regression models.

1. Social network methods have become a key tool for describing, modelling, and testing hypotheses about the social structures of animals. However, due to the non-independence of network data and the presence of confounds, specialized statistical techniques are often needed to test hypotheses in these networks.

Fine-scale genetic structure reflects limited and coordinated dispersal in the colonial monk parakeet, Myiopsitta monachus.

The genetic structure of animal populations has considerable behavioural, ecological and evolutionary implications and may arise from various demographic traits. Here, we use observational field data and molecular genetics to determine the genetic structure of an invasive population of monk parakeets, Myiopsitta monachus, at a range of spatial scales, and investigate the demographic processes that generate the observed structure. Monk parakeets construct large nests that can house several pairs occupying separate chambers; these nests are often aggregated within nesting trees.

An aryl hydrocarbon receptor from the caecilian Gymnopis multiplicata suggests low dioxin affinity in the ancestor of all three amphibian orders.

The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) plays pleiotropic roles in the development and physiology of vertebrates in conjunction with xenobiotic and endogenous ligands. It is best known for mediating the toxic effects of dioxin-like pollutants such as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). While most vertebrates possess at least one AHR that binds TCDD tightly, amphibian AHRs bind TCDD with very low affinity.

Ant colony nest networks adapt to resource disruption.

Animal social structure is shaped by environmental conditions, such as food availability. This is important as conditions are likely to change in the future and changes to social structure can have cascading ecological effects. Wood ants are a useful taxon for the study of the relationship between social structure and environmental conditions, as some populations form large nest networks and they are ecologically dominant in many northern hemisphere woodlands.

Molecular and Functional Properties of the Atlantic Cod () Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptors Ahr1a and Ahr2a.

The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (Ahr) is a ligand-activated transcription factor that mediates the toxicity of halogenated and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in vertebrates. Atlantic cod ( ) has recently emerged as a model organism in environmental toxicology studies, and increased knowledge of Ahr-mediated responses to xenobiotics is imperative. Genome mining and phylogenetic analyses revealed two Ahr-encoding genes in the Atlantic cod genome, and .