Background: Factors such as anxiety, worry, and perceptions of insufficient knowledge about a topic motivate individuals to seek web-based health information to guide their health-related decision-making. These factors converged during the COVID-19 pandemic and were linked to COVID-19 vaccination decision-making. While research shows that web-based search relevant to COVID-19 was associated with subsequent vaccine uptake, less is known about COVID-19 vaccine intent search (which assesses vaccine availability, accessibility, and eligibility) as a signal of vaccine readiness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPublic health campaigns addressing COVID-19 vaccination beliefs may be effective in changing COVID-19 vaccination behaviors, particularly among people who remain vaccine hesitant. The "" COVID-19 public education campaign (the Campaign) was designed to increase COVID-19 vaccine confidence and uptake. This study aims to evaluate whether Campaign dose was associated with changes in vaccination beliefs related to COVID-19 vaccine concerns and perceived risks, the importance of COVID-19 vaccines, the perceived benefits of COVID-19 vaccination, normative beliefs about COVID-19 vaccination, and perceptions about general vaccine safety and effectiveness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe near-ubiquitous use of social media in the United States (U.S.) highlights the utility of social media for encouraging vaccination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Monovalent COVID-19 boosters lower the risk of COVID-19 disease, infection, hospitalization, and death. This study examined associations between exposure to a booster public education campaign (the booster campaign) and the increases in booster uptake and reduced length of time until booster uptake among U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRacial and ethnic minority groups have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and have experienced systemic, attitudinal, and access-related barriers to COVID-19 vaccination. We examined differences in COVID-19 vaccine readiness-a composite measure of vaccination intention and behavior-between non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, non-Hispanic Asian American/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDetrital-based trophic cascades are often considered weak or absent in tropical stream ecosystems because of the prevalence of omnivorous macroconsumers and the dearth of leaf-shredding insects. In this study, we isolate top-down effects of three macroconsumer species on detrital processing in headwater streams draining Trinidad's northern mountains. We separated effects of different macroconsumers by experimentally manipulating their temporal access to isolated benthic habitat over the diel cycle.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPopulation variation in trophic niche is widespread among organisms and is of increasing interest given its role in both speciation and adaptation to changing environments. Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) inhabiting stream reaches with different predation regimes have rapidly evolved divergent life history traits. Here, we investigated the effects of both predation and resource availability on guppy trophic niches by evaluating their gut contents, resource standing stocks, and δN and δC stable isotopes across five streams during the wet season.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDecades of theory and recent empirical results have shown that evolutionary, population, community and ecosystem properties are the result of feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes. The vast majority of theory and empirical research on these eco-evolutionary feedbacks has focused on interactions among population size and mean traits of populations. However, numbers and mean traits represent only a fraction of the possible feedback dimensions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe effect of consumers on their resources has been demonstrated in many systems but is often confounded by trophic interactions with other consumers. Consumers may also have behavioral and life history adaptations to each other and to co-occurring predators that may additionally modulate their particular roles in ecosystems. We experimentally excluded large consumers from tile periphyton, leaves and natural benthic substrata using submerged electrified frames in three stream reaches with overlapping consumer assemblages in Trinidad, West Indies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcological and evolutionary processes may interact on the same timescale, but we are just beginning to understand how. Several studies have examined the net effects of adaptive evolution on ecosystem properties. However, we do not know whether these effects are confined to direct interactions or whether they propagate further through indirect ecological pathways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe elemental composition of animals, or their organismal stoichiometry, is thought to constrain their contribution to nutrient recycling, their interactions with other animals, and their demographic rates. Factors that affect organismal stoichiometry are generally poorly understood, but likely reflect elemental investments in morphological features and life history traits, acting in concert with the environmental availability of elements. We assessed the relative contribution of organismal traits and environmental variability to the stoichiometry of an insectivorous Neotropical stream fish, Rivulus hartii.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
February 2010
Theory suggests evolutionary change can significantly influence and act in tandem with ecological forces via ecological-evolutionary feedbacks. This theory assumes that significant evolutionary change occurs over ecologically relevant timescales and that phenotypes have differential effects on the environment. Here we test the hypothesis that local adaptation causes ecosystem structure and function to diverge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
June 2009
Evolution has been shown to be a critical determinant of ecological processes in some systems, but its importance relative to traditional ecological effects is not well known. In addition, almost nothing is known about the role of coevolution in shaping ecosystem function. Here, we experimentally evaluated the relative effects of species invasion (a traditional ecological effect), evolution and coevolution on ecosystem processes in Trinidadian streams.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroscience databases linking genes, proteins, (patho)physiology, anatomy and behaviour across species will be valuable in a broad range of studies of the nervous system. G2Cdb is such a neuroscience database aiming to present a global view of the role of synapse proteins in physiology and disease. G2Cdb warehouses sets of genes and proteins experimentally elucidated by proteomic mass spectroscopy of signalling complexes and proteins biochemically isolated from mammalian synapse preparations, giving an experimentally validated definition of the constituents of the mammalian synapse.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProteomic experiments have produced a draft profile of the overall molecular composition of the mammalian neuronal synapse. It appears that synapses have over 1000 protein components and the mapping of their interactions, organization and functions will lead to a global view of the role of synapses in physiology and disease. A major functional subcomponent of the synaptic machinery is a multiprotein complex of glutamate receptors and adhesion proteins with associated adaptor and signalling enzymes totally 185 proteins known as the N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor complex/MAGUK associated signalling complex (NRC/MASC).
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