ESGO Survey on Current Practice in the Management of Cervical Cancer.

Objective: The aim of this survey was to acquire an overview of the current management of cervical cancer with an emphasis on the early disease stages.

Materials And Methods: A hyperlink to the survey was sent to the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology Office database. The survey contained 6 groups of questions regarding the characteristics of respondents, pretreatment workup, management of the early stages of cervical cancer, adjuvant treatment, fertility-sparing treatment, and surveillance.

When to go with the crowd: modelling synchronization of all-or-nothing activity transitions in grouped animals.

For groups of animals to keep together, the group members have to perform switches between staying in one place and moving to another place in synchrony. However, synchronization imposes a cost on individual animals, because they have to switch from one to the other behaviour at a communal time rather than at their ideal times. Here we model this situation analytically for groups in which the ideal times vary quasinormally and grouping benefit increases linearly with group size.

Evolutionarily stable strategies for stochastic processes.

The classical definition of evolutionary stability assumes that the fitness of each phenotype is fully determined by the composition of phenotypes in the population and by the strategies of each of these phenotypes. In natural populations, however, stochasticity often plays a crucial role in determining the fitness of an individual and a deterministic fitness function is probably rather rare. For example, choices of a new host plant, prey or oviposition patch are completely stochastic processes.

Are classical predator-prey models relevant to the real world?

Mathematical models of predator-prey population dynamics are widely used for predicting the effect of predators as biocontrol agents, but the assumptions of the models are more relevant to parasite-host systems. Predator-prey systems, at least in insects, substantially differ from what is assumed by these models. The main differences are: (i) Juveniles and adults have to be considered as two different entities, as the former stay within a patch and do not reproduce, while the latter move between patches of prey and reproduce there.