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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Greater Sage-Grouse Vital Rate And Habitat Use Response To Landscape Scale Habitat Manipulations And Vegetation Micro-Sites In Northwestern Utah, Charles P. Sandford
Greater Sage-Grouse Vital Rate And Habitat Use Response To Landscape Scale Habitat Manipulations And Vegetation Micro-Sites In Northwestern Utah, Charles P. Sandford
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
The greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus; sage-grouse) has been a species of conservation concern since the early 20th century. The decline of populations has largely been attributed to loss and degradation of sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) habitats. To contribute to the knowledge of sage-grouse ecology and quantify the effectiveness of landscape scale habitat manipulations intended to benefit sage-grouse, I monitored habitat use and vital-rates (i.e., nest and brood success) of 45 sage-grouse females in the Box Ender Sage-Grouse Management Area (SGMA) in northwestern Utah. Using telemetry locations of sage-grouse females with known nest and brood fates, I generated …
Anthropogenic And Natural Stressors And Their Effect On Immunity, Reproduction, And The Stress Response, Lorin A. Neuman-Lee
Anthropogenic And Natural Stressors And Their Effect On Immunity, Reproduction, And The Stress Response, Lorin A. Neuman-Lee
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
Animals must be able to cope with many natural and human-made stressors in order to successfully survive and reproduce. These stressors can come in many forms and are increasing as human activities become more and more prevalent across the globe. In order to cope with these stressors, organisms must allocate limited energy away from processes such as reproduction to mount a stress response. This stress response involves the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and results in a cascade of hormones and down-stream effects, such as changes in reproduction and immune function. In order to understand how reptiles and amphibians cope …
Biodiversity, Community Dynamics, And Novel Foraging Behaviors Of A Rich Native Bee Fauna Across Habitats At Pinnacles National Park, California, Joan M. Meiners
Biodiversity, Community Dynamics, And Novel Foraging Behaviors Of A Rich Native Bee Fauna Across Habitats At Pinnacles National Park, California, Joan M. Meiners
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
Global concern about honeybee declines has spurred feverish research about the status and protection of this single species, yet our understanding of the ecology and issues impacting thousands of species of native bees lags behind. Pinnacles National Park, America's newest, near Salinas, California, is currently the most densely biodiverse area for native bees known on the planet. Recent work by researchers at Utah State University and the USDA-ARS has documented 479 species of native bees in only 42 square miles of this park. During two years of field studies and 308 collector days, we assembled data on 52,853 bee specimens …
The Role Of Gpr84 In Medium-Chain Saturated Fatty Acid Taste Transduction, Yan Liu
The Role Of Gpr84 In Medium-Chain Saturated Fatty Acid Taste Transduction, Yan Liu
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
The prevalence of overweight or obese in adults has nearly doubled during the past two decades, and obesity increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and even some types of cancer. One of the factors closely linked with the obesity epidemic is overconsumption of dietary fat. Accumulating evidence has supported the existence of the "taste of fat", and more and more studies have focused on identifying the mechanisms of fatty acid detection by gustatory system. In this study, I showed for the first time that medium-chain saturated fatty acids (MCFAs) were able to activate taste cells isolated from mice, and …
Stable Isotopes And The Ecology And Physiology Of Reptiles, Andrew M. Durso
Stable Isotopes And The Ecology And Physiology Of Reptiles, Andrew M. Durso
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
When animals don’t have enough food, they have to “choose” between “spending” their limited energy on themselves or on their offspring. Biologists think that reptiles can make this choice quickly in response to different environments. But, it can be hard to study these choices because it is hard to convert between, for example, the number of eggs laid and the speed of healing a wound. By using stable isotope chemistry, we can collect more detailed and comparable information about how lizards and other animals spend their limited resources than with any other method. For example, lizards in the wild have …
An Allometric Approach To Evaluate Physiological And Production Efficiencies In Tree Size For Tart Cherry And Apple Orchard Systems, Zachary T. Brym
An Allometric Approach To Evaluate Physiological And Production Efficiencies In Tree Size For Tart Cherry And Apple Orchard Systems, Zachary T. Brym
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
In orchard systems, the size of a tree and the physical structure of its canopy influences how the tree gathers resources and uses them to produce fruit. Smaller orchard trees produce a higher proportion of fruit relative to their size. Small trees also produce higher quality fruit than larger trees. These relationships were demonstrated for apples and tart cherries grown in Utah. In physiological ecology, models called allometries have been developed that explain how the size of wild plants is related to growth, architecture, and reproduction. These models were applied to apple and tart cherry orchard systems and revealed consistent …
Spider Aggregate Glue Sequence Characterization And Expression, Kyle Berg
Spider Aggregate Glue Sequence Characterization And Expression, Kyle Berg
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
Orb-weaving spiders create a glue which is secreted onto the web to capture and retain insects. This glue is made from aggregate protein. Aggregate glue is sticky when wet and can stretch far when pulled at slow speeds, and pull back with a greater force if pulled at high speeds which helps it achieve its purpose as the adhesive that keeps insects in the web. These features also make it an attractive target for applications such as a surgical glue or underwater adhesive. Unfortunately, very little is known about the aggregate glue gene, and knowledge of the genetic sequence is …
Hybridization, Population Genetic Structure And Gene Expression In The Genus Boechera, Martin Peter Schilling
Hybridization, Population Genetic Structure And Gene Expression In The Genus Boechera, Martin Peter Schilling
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
When we look at life on earth, we can see a lot of different life forms, but we still do not fully understand how these different life forms came to be and at which points in time these life forms began to be different enough from each other so we could call them by different names, or species. Some groups of species on earth, especially plants, seem to reproduce with each other, even though they are already very different from each other so that we call them different species. This process is called hybridization, and it can stir up the …