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Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

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Microhabitat Use Affects Brain Size And Structure In Intertidal Gobies, Gemma E. White, Culum Brown May 2016

Microhabitat Use Affects Brain Size And Structure In Intertidal Gobies, Gemma E. White, Culum Brown

Culum Brown, PhD

The ecological cognition hypothesis poses that the brains and behaviours of individuals are largely shaped by the environments in which they live and the associated challenges they must overcome during their lives. Here we examine the effect of environmental complexity on relative brain size in 4 species of intertidal gobies from differing habitats. Two species were rock pool specialists that lived on spatially complex rocky shores, while the remainder lived on dynamic, but structurally simple, sandy shores. We found that rock pool-dwelling species had relatively larger brains and telencephalons in particular, while sand-dwelling species had a larger optic tectum and …

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Biogeographical Distribution And Natural Groupings Among Five Sympatric Wild Cats In Tropical South Asia, Mohammed Ashraf Oct 2007

Biogeographical Distribution And Natural Groupings Among Five Sympatric Wild Cats In Tropical South Asia, Mohammed Ashraf

Mohammed Ashraf

Small to large carnivorous mammals in the tropical belt face extinction at an unprecedented rate. The vanishing of sympatric wild cats appears to be due to habitat fragmentation, human encroachment & poaching. The focus of this study is on ecological and distributional parameters that influence the wild cat communities in tropical South Asia. The distributional data for five sympatric cats is analyzed with the aim of understanding the species-habitat association under a conceptually unified binary-matrix framework. The use of cluster analysis techniques in this ecological study have helped to reveal the natural groupings among felid guilds and their ecological resource …

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Factors Influencing Maternal Behaviour In A Burrower Bug, Sehirus Cinctus (Heteroptera: Cydnidae), Scott Kight Dec 1996

Factors Influencing Maternal Behaviour In A Burrower Bug, Sehirus Cinctus (Heteroptera: Cydnidae), Scott Kight

Scott Kight

Female burrower bugs, Sehirus cinctus (Cydnidae), brood and provision their young. This study provides an integrative approach to insect parental behaviour by examining the influence of maternal experience on the maintenance and termination of maternal care. Intensity of care (maternal responsivity) was determined by assaying a subject’s response to tactile disturbance and by measuring time spent in proximity to young. First-brood mothers were highly responsive until 3 days after their eggs hatched. Second-brood mothers, however, were only responsive until 1–2 days post-hatching. This effect was associated with differences in age and parity, but not experience, because …

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