Prion Protein Gene (PRNP) Sequences Suggest Differing Vulnerability to Chronic Wasting Disease for Florida Key Deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) and Columbian White-Tailed Deer (O. v. leucurus).

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal, highly transmissible spongiform encephalopathy caused by an infectious prion protein. CWD is spreading across North American cervids. Studies of the prion protein gene (PRNP) in white-tailed deer (WTD; Odocoileus virginianus) have identified non-synonymous substitutions associated with reduced CWD frequency.

Visual acuity and egg spatial chromatic contrast predict egg rejection behavior of American robins.

Color and spatial vision is critical for recognition and discrimination tasks affecting fitness, including finding food and mates, and recognizing offspring. For example, as a counter defense to avoid the cost of raising the unrelated offspring of obligate interspecific avian brood parasites, many host species routinely view, recognize and remove the foreign egg(s) from their nests. Recent research has shown that host species visually attend to both chromatic and spatial pattern features of eggs; yet how hosts simultaneously integrate these features together when recognizing eggs remains an open question.

Shedding light on environmentally transmitted parasites: lighter conditions within lakes restrict epidemic size.

Parasite fitness depends on a successful journey from one host to another. For parasites that are transmitted environmentally, abiotic conditions might modulate the success of this journey. Here we evaluate how light, a key abiotic factor, influences spatiotemporal patterns of zooplankton disease where light varies seasonally, across lakes, and with depth in a lake.

Ecological uncertainty favours the diversification of host use in avian brood parasites.

Adaptive responses to ecological uncertainty may affect the dynamics of interspecific interactions and shape the course of evolution within symbioses. Obligate avian brood parasites provide a particularly tractable system for understanding how uncertainty, driven by environmental variability and symbiont phenology, influences the evolution of species interactions. Here, we use phylogenetically-informed analyses and a comprehensive dataset on the behaviour and geographic distribution of obligate avian brood parasites and their hosts to demonstrate that increasing uncertainty in thermoregulation and parental investment of parasitic young are positively associated with host richness and diversity.

Essential oil spray reduces clinical signs of insect bite hypersensitivity in horses.

Objective: To assess the efficacy of an herbal spray combining various essential oils, with a claim of mast cell stabilisation, antipruritic, anti-inflammatory, and insect repellent effects on the clinical presentation of insect bite hypersensitivity (IBH) in horses.

Design: Double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomised, cross-over clinical trial.

Methods: Twenty adult horses with clinical IBH were treated with a daily application of herbal spray or placebo for 28 days in a randomised, cross-over fashion, separated by a>28-day washout period.

Behavior-related gene regulatory networks: A new level of organization in the brain.

Neuronal networks are the standard heuristic model today for describing brain activity associated with animal behavior. Recent studies have revealed an extensive role for a completely distinct layer of networked activities in the brain-the gene regulatory network (GRN)-that orchestrates expression levels of hundreds to thousands of genes in a behavior-related manner. We examine emerging insights into the relationships between these two types of networks and discuss their interplay in spatial as well as temporal dimensions, across multiple scales of organization.

Physiological responses of host parents to rearing an avian brood parasite: An experimental study.

Raising an obligate avian brood parasite is costly for host parents because it redirects valuable parental resources from one's own offspring to genetically unrelated young. The costs of raising a brood parasite may be mediated by physiological stressors for foster parents if it requires greater or biased parental effort compared to raising non-parasitized broods. For example, upregulating glucocorticoid hormones or reducing immune responses may mediate a trade-off between resource allocation to a current brood versus future reproductive opportunities, but published data on parasitized hosts' physiology are scarce.

Endocrine regulation of egg rejection in an avian brood parasite host.

Parasite-host coevolution can lead to novel behavioural adaptations in hosts to resist parasitism. In avian obligate brood parasite and host systems, many host species have evolved diverse cognitive and behavioural traits to recognize and reject parasitic eggs. Our understanding of the evolution and ecology of these defences hinges on identifying the mechanisms that regulate them.

Female-female aggression and male responses to the two colour morphs of female common cuckoos.

Female-only colour polymorphism is rare in birds, but occurs in brood parasitic cuckoos (Cuculidae). Obligate brood parasites leave incubation and parental care to other species (hosts), so female-female interactions can play a role in how parasites guard critical resources (host nests) within their laying areas. The plumage of adult female common cuckoos (Cuculus canorus) is either rufous (typically rare) or grey (common), whereas adult male conspecifics are monochromatic (grey).

Microbial communities of container aquatic habitats shift in response to Culex restuans larvae.

We examined how larvae of Culex restuans mosquito influences the bacterial abundance, composition and diversity in simulated container aquatic habitats. The microbiota of Cx. restuans larvae were also characterized and compared to those of their larval habitats.

Predictors of individual variation in reversal learning performance in three-spined sticklebacks.

Behavioral flexibility is a type of phenotypic plasticity that can influence how animals cope with environmental change and is often measured with a reversal learning paradigm. The goal of this study was to understand why individuals differ in behavioral flexibility, and whether individual differences in behavioral flexibility fit the predictions of coping styles theory. We tested whether individual variation in flexibility correlates with response to novelty (response to a novel object), boldness (emergence into a novel environment), and behavioral persistence (response to a barrier), and tested for trade-offs between how quickly individuals learn an initial discrimination and flexibility.

Simultaneous changes in seed size, oil content and protein content driven by selection of homologues during soybean domestication.

Soybean accounts for more than half of the global production of oilseed and more than a quarter of the protein used globally for human food and animal feed. Soybean domestication involved parallel increases in seed size and oil content, and a concomitant decrease in protein content. However, science has not yet discovered whether these effects were due to selective pressure on a single gene or multiple genes.

The evolution of conspecific acceptance threshold models.

How do organisms balance different types of recognition errors when cues associated with desirable and undesirable individuals or resources overlap? This is a fundamental question of signal detection theory (SDT). As applied in sociobiology, SDT is not limited to a single context or animal taxon, therefore its application can span what may be considered dissimilar systems. One of the applications of SDT is the suite of acceptance threshold models proposed by Reeve (1989), which analysed how individuals should balance acceptance and rejection errors in social discrimination decisions across a variety of recognition contexts, distinguished by how these costs and benefits relatively combine.

Intraspecific variation in resource use is not explained by population persistence or seasonality.

Populations of generalist grazers often contain genotypes with "powerful" and "efficient" strategies. Powerful genotypes grow rapidly on rich-quality resources, but slowly on poorer-quality ones, while efficient genotypes grow relatively better on poorer resources but cannot exploit richer resources as well. Via a "power-efficiency" trade-off, variation in resource quality could maintain genetic diversity.

Effects of predation risk on egg steroid profiles across multiple populations of threespine stickleback.

Predation often has consistent effects on prey behavior and morphology, but whether the physiological mechanisms underlying these effects show similarly consistent patterns across different populations remains an open question. In vertebrates, predation risk activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and there is growing evidence that activation of the maternal HPA axis can have intergenerational consequences via, for example, maternally-derived steroids in eggs. Here, we investigated how predation risk affects a suite of maternally-derived steroids in threespine stickleback eggs across nine Alaskan lakes that vary in whether predatory trout are absent, native, or have been stocked within the last 25 years.

Exerting an influence on evolution.

Experiments on mice have shown that developmental processes are influencing the generation of phenotypic variation in a way that shapes evolution.

Container Type Affects Mosquito (Diptera: Culicidae) Oviposition Choice.

Larvae of container-breeding mosquitoes develop in a wide range of container habitats found in residential neighborhoods. Different mosquito species may exhibit preference for different container types and sizes. Due to phenological differences, species composition in container habitats may change over time.

Shared transcriptional responses to con- and heterospecific behavioral antagonists in a wild songbird.

The recognition of and differential responses to salient stimuli are among the main drivers of behavioral plasticity, yet, how animals evolve and modulate functional responses to novel classes of antagonistic stimuli remain poorly understood. We studied free-living male red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) to test whether gene expression responses in blood are distinct or shared between patterns of aggressive behavioral responses directed at simulated conspecific versus heterospecific intruders. In this species, males defend territories against conspecific males and respond aggressively to female brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater), a brood parasite that commonly lays eggs in blackbird nests.

Lack of fine-tuned egg rejection adjustment in barn swallows with variable local abundance of common cuckoos.

Tracking variation in hosts' responses to parasitism across space in a metapopulation is critical to assess the current status of parasitism/anti-parasitism in a host-parasite system, which is also helpful to infer its coevolutionary history. The barn swallow Hirundo rustica is a tractable bird species to understand potential fine-tuned adaptations to avian brood parasitism across small geographic scales, both in the context of variation in its foreign-egg rejection pattern, and its widespread distribution in cuckoo-free urban areas and in cuckoo-present rural habitats, including reedbeds. Here we tested whether variation in co-occurrence between the host and its rare brood parasite, the common cuckoo Cuculus canorus (i.

Host affinity of endophytic fungi and the potential for reciprocal interactions involving host secondary chemistry.

Premise: Interactions between fungal endophytes and their host plants present useful systems for identifying important factors affecting assembly of host-associated microbiomes. Here we investigated the role of secondary chemistry in mediating host affinity of asymptomatic foliar endophytic fungi using Psychotria spp. and Theobroma cacao (cacao) as hosts.

Variation in mouse pelvic morphology maps to locations enriched in Sox9 Class II and Pitx1 regulatory features.

Variation in pelvic morphology has a complex genetic basis and its patterning and specification is governed by conserved developmental pathways. Whether the mechanisms underlying the differentiation and specification of the pelvis also produce the morphological covariation on which natural selection may act, is still an open question in evolutionary developmental biology. We use high-resolution quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in the F generation of an advanced intercross experiment (LG,SM-G ) to characterize the genetic architecture of the mouse pelvis.