Digital Commons Network^™

Shared Phylogeographical Breaks In A Caribbean Coral Reef Sponge And Its Invertebrate Commensals, Melissa B. Debiasse, Vincent P. Richards, Mahmood S. Shivji, Michael E. Hellberg

Faculty Publications

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Aim: To test whether phylogeographical barriers in the brooding sponge Callyspongia vaginalis match breaks previously identified in the Caribbean. We also compared patterns of subdivision in the sponge to those of three of its commensals, the broadcast spawning brittle star Ophiothrix suensonii and the brooding amphipods Leucothoe ashleyae and L. kensleyi, and tested whether any shared breaks arose simultaneously. Location: Florida, Bahamas and the Caribbean. Methods: Subdivision of C. vaginalis populations was inferred from one mitochondrial (COI) and six nuclear loci using clustering analyses. We identified phylogeographical breaks in the sponge and its …

Getting A Grip At The Edge: Recolonization And Introgression In Eastern Pacific Porites Corals, Michael E. Hellberg, Carlos Prada, Maxine H. Tan, Zac H. Forsman, Iliana B. Baums

Faculty Publications

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Aim: To infer species identity, population isolation, and geographical variation in inter-specific hybridization among corals of the genus Porites from the central and eastern tropical Pacific, with a focus on the timing of separation between populations of P. evermanni and P. lobata divided by the Eastern Pacific Barrier. Location: Hawaii, American Samoa, Panama and the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador. Methods: Maximum likelihood gene trees were obtained for mitochondrial DNA (COI), the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), and 5 single-copy nuclear (scn) gene regions. Allelic networks were used to group multi-locus scn data into species …

The Effect Of Demographic Correlations On The Stochastic Population Dynamics Of Perennial Plants, Aldo Compagnoni, Andrew J. Bibian, Brad M. Ochocki, Haldre S. Rogers, Emily L. Schultz, Michelle E. Sneck, Bret D. Elderd, Amy M. Iler, David W. Inouye, Hans Jacquemyn, Tom E.X. Miller

Faculty Publications

© 2016 by the Ecological Society of America. Understanding the influence of environmental variability on population dynamics is a fundamental goal of ecology. Theory suggests that, for populations in variable environments, temporal correlations between demographic vital rates (e.g., growth, survival, reproduction) can increase (if positive) or decrease (if negative) the variability of year-to-year population growth. Because this variability generally decreases long-term population viability, vital rate correlations may importantly affect population dynamics in stochastic environments. Despite long-standing theoretical interest, it is unclear whether vital rate correlations are common in nature, whether their directions are predominantly negative or positive, and whether they …

Transformational Principles For Neon Sampling Of Mammalian Parasites And Pathogens: A Response To Springer And Colleagues, Joseph A. Cook, Stephen E. Greiman, Salvatore J. Agosta, Robert P. Anderson, Brian S. Arbogast, Robert J. Baker, Walter Boeger, Robert D. Bradley, Daniel R. Brooks, Rebecca Cole, John R. Demboski, Andrew P. Dobson, Jonathan L. Dunnum, Ralph P. Eckerlin, Jacob Esselstyn, Kurt E. Galbreath, John Hawdon, Hopi E. Hoekstra, Susan J. Kutz, Jessica E. Light, Link E. Olson, Bruce D. Patterson, James L. Patton, Anna J. Phillips, Eric Rickart, Duke S. Rogers, Mark E. Siddall, Vasyl V. Tkach, Eric P. Hoberg

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Negative Effects Of Pathogen-Infected Prey On Predators: A Meta-Analysis, Andrew J. Flick, Miguel A. Acevedo, Bret D. Elderd

Faculty Publications

© 2016 The Authors Intra-guild predation (IGP) – where a top predator (IGPred) consumes both a basal resource and a competitor for that resource (IGPrey) – has become a fundamental part of understanding species interactions and community dynamics. IGP communities composed of intraguild predators and prey have been well studied; however, we know less about IGP communities composed of predators, pathogens, and resources. Resource quality plays an important role in community dynamics and may influence IGP dynamics as well. We conducted a meta-analysis on predator–pathogen–resource communities to determine whether resource quality mediated by the pathogen affected predator life-history traits and …

A General Elliptic Nonlinear System Of Multiple Functions With Application, Timothy Robertson, Joon Hyuk Kang

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to give a sufficient condition for the existence, nonexistence and uniqueness of positive solutions to a rather general type of elliptic system of the Dirichlet problem on a bounded domain Ω in Rn . We also investigate the effects of perturbation on the positive solutions to the system. The techniques used in this paper are upper-lower solutions, eigenvalues of operators, the maximum principles and spectrum estimates. The arguments also rely on some detailed properties for the solution of logistic equations. This result yields an algebraically computable criterion for the positive coexistence of competing species …

The Mirror-Based Eyes Of Scallops Demonstrate A Light-Evoked Pupillary Response, M. Desmond Ramirez, Autum N. Pairett, M. Sabrina Pankey, Jeanne M. Serb, Daniel Isaac Speiser, Andrew J. Swafford, Todd H. Oakley

Faculty Publications

The opsin gene family encodes key proteins animals use to sense light and has expanded dramatically as it originated early in animal evolution. Understanding the origins of opsin diversity can offer clues to how separate lineages of animals have repurposed different opsin paralogs for different light-detecting functions. However, the more we look for opsins outside of eyes and from additional animal phyla, the more opsins we uncover, suggesting we still do not know the true extent of opsin diversity, nor the ancestry of opsin diversity in animals. To estimate the number of opsin paralogs present in both the last common …

Condition Of Larval Spanish Mackerel Scomberomorus Maculatus In Relation To The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, John Timothy Ransom, J.E. Filbrun, Frank J. Hernandez Jr.

Faculty Publications

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DWHOS) coincided with the pelagic larval stages of many valued commercial and recreational fishes in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Larval fish survival and eventual recruitment into adult populations may have been impacted directly through toxicity or indirectly through changes in the planktonic food web caused by the release of oil and chemical dispersants during the DWHOS event. Using samples from a long-term ichthyoplankton survey off the coast of Alabama, USA, in a region impacted by the DWHOS, the abundance and condition of larval Spanish mackerel Scomberomorus maculatus were compared during summer months in years …

Coastal Wetland Response To Sea-Level Rise In A Fluvial Estuarine System, Karim Alizad, Scott C. Hagen, James T. Morris, Stephen C. Medeiros, Matthew V. Bilskie, John F. Weishampel

Faculty Publications

Coastal wetlands are likely to lose productivity under increasing rates of sea-level rise (SLR). This study assessed a fluvial estuarine salt marsh system using the Hydro-MEM model under four SLR scenarios. The Hydro-MEM model was developed to apply the dynamics of SLR as well as capture the effects associated with the rate of SLR in the simulation. Additionally, the model uses constants derived from a 2-year bioassay in the Apalachicola marsh system. In order to increase accuracy, the lidar-based marsh platform topography was adjusted using Real Time Kinematic survey data. A river inflow boundary condition was also imposed to simulate …

The Impact Of A Large-Scale Climate Event On Antarctic Ecosystem Processes, Andrew G. Fountain, Grace Saba, Byron Adams, Peter Doran, William Fraser, Michael Gooseff, Maciej Obryk, John C. Priscu, Sharon Stammerjohn, Ross A. Virginia

Faculty Publications

© 2016 The Author(s) 2016. Extreme climate and weather events, such as a drought, hurricanes, or ice storms, can strongly imprint ecosystem processing and may alter ecosystem structure. Ecosystems in extreme environments are particularly vulnerable because of their adaptation to severe limitations in energy, water, or nutrients. The vulnerability can be expressed as a relatively long-lasting ecosystem response to a small or brief change in environmental conditions. Such an event occurred in Antarctica and affected two vastly different ecosystems: a marine-dominated coastal system and a terrestrial polar desert. Both sites experienced winds that warmed air temperatures above the 0°C threshold, …

Cryopreservation Of Lipid Bilayers By Lea Proteins From Artemia Franciscana And Trehalose, Daniel S. Moore, Steven C. Hand

Faculty Publications

© 2016 Elsevier Inc. The capacity of Late Embryogenesis Abundant (LEA) proteins and trehalose to protect liposomes against freezing-induced damage was examined by measuring the leakage of 5(6)-carboxyfluorescein (CF). Liposomes were prepared to simulate the lipid compositions of the inner leaflet of the plasma membrane, outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM), and inner mitochondrial membrane (IMM). Two recombinant LEA proteins belonging to Group 3 (AfrLEA2 and AfrLEA3m) were expressed and purified from embryos of Artemia franciscana. Only OMM-like liposomes were significantly protected by AfrLEA2 and AfrLEA3m against freeze-thaw damage; at the highest protein:lipid mass ratio tested, leakage of CF was 56.3% of …

Sex And Tissue Specificity Of Peg3 Promoters, Bambarendage P.U. Perera, Joomyeong Kim

Faculty Publications

© 2016 Perera, Kim. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The expression of mouse Peg3 (Paternally expressed gene 3) is driven by 4 promoters, including its main and three alternative promoters. The sexual, temporal and spatial specificity of these promoters was characterized in the current study. According to the results, the main promoter displays ubiquitous expression patterns throughout different stages and tissues. In contrast, the expression of Peg3 driven by the alternative …

Amine Reactive Dyes: An Alternative To Estimate Membrane Integrity In Fish Sperm Cells, Leticia Torres, Terrence R. Tiersch

Faculty Publications

Fluorescent dyes that binds irreversibly to cellular amines, come in several available emission spectra, and do not poses health concerns were used to evaluate membrane integrity in fish sperm cells. The objectives of the present study were to determine: (1) a working dye concentration for fish sperm samples, and (2) if the traditional propidium iodide/SYBR-14 staining combination was comparable with the amine reactive dye (ARD) methods at identifying cell populations with intact and compromised membranes after sperm activation, refrigerated storage, and exposure to cryoprotectant and surfactant. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) sperm were obtained by stripping, and pooled samples (in triplicate) were …

Do Movement Behaviors Identify Reproductive Habitat Sampling For Wild Turkeys?, Mason D. Conley, Nathan A. Yeldell, Michael J. Chamberlain, Bret A. Collier

Faculty Publications

Selection of habitats has regularly been suggested to influence species demography at both local and broad scales. The expectation is that selection behaviors have positive benefits via greater fitness or increased survival. The current paradigm of habitat selection theory suggests a hierarchical process, where an individual first selects where they choose to live (e.g., range) and then searches and selects locations within this range meeting life history needs. Using high-frequency GPS data collected from reproductively active Rio Grande (n = 21) and Eastern (n = 23) wild turkeys, we evaluated a long-standing theory for ground-nesting galliformes, in that movements during …

Sexually Dimorphic Gene Expression In Bovine Conceptuses At The Initiation Of Implantation, Niamh Forde, Veronica Maillo, Peadar O'Gaora, Constantine A. Simintiras, Roger G. Sturmey, Alan D. Ealy, Thomas E. Spencer, Alfonso Gutierrez-Adan, Dimitrios Rizos, Patrick Lonergan

Faculty Publications

In cattle, maternal recognition of pregnancy occurs on Day 16 via secretion of interferon tau (IFNT) by the conceptus. The endometrium can distinguish between embryos with different developmental competencies. In eutherian mammals, X-chromosome inactivation (XCI) is required to ensure an equal transcriptional level of most X-linked genes for both male and female embryos in adult tissues, but this process is markedly different in cattle than mice. We examined how sexual dimorphism affected conceptus transcript abundance and amino acid composition as well as the endometrial transcriptome during the peri-implantation period of pregnancy. Of the 5132 genes that were differentially expressed on …

Combining Intensive Counseling By Frontline Workers With A Nationwide Mass Media Campaign Has Large Differential Impacts On Complementary Feeding Practices But Not On Child Growth: Results Of A Cluster-Randomized Program Evaluation In Bangladesh, Purnima Menon, Phuong Hong Nguyen, Kuntal Kumar Saha, Adiba Khaled, Tina Sanghvi, Jean Baker, Kaosar Afsana, Raisul Haque, Edward A. Frongillo Jr., Marie T. Ruel, Rahul Rawat

Faculty Publications

Background: Complementary feeding (CF) contributes to child growth and development, but few CF programs are delivered at scale. Alive & Thrive addressed this in Bangladesh through intensified interpersonal counseling (IPC), mass media (MM), and community mobilization (CM).

Objective: The objective was to evaluate the impact of providing IPC + MM + CM (intensive) compared with standard nutrition counseling + less intensive MM + CM (nonintensive) on CF practices and anthropometric measurements.

Methods: We used a cluster-randomized, nonblinded evaluation with cross-sectional surveys [n = ∼600 and 1090 children 6-23.9 mo and 24-47.9 mo/group, respectively, at baseline (2010) and n = ∼500 …

A Snapshot Of The Microbiome Of Ambylomma Tuberculatum Ticks Infesting The Gopher Tortoise, An Endangered Species, Khemraj Budachetri, Daniel Lyle Gaillard, Jaclyn Bo Williams, Nabanita Mukherjee, Shahid Karim

Faculty Publications

The gopher tortoise tick, Amblyomma tuberculatum, has a unique relationship with the gopher tortoise, Gopherus polyphemus, found in sandy habitats across the southeastern United States. We aimed to understand the overall bacterial community associated with A. tuberculatum while also focusing on spotted fever group Rickettsia. These tortoises in the Southern Mississippi region are a federally threatened species; therefore, we have carefully trapped the tortoises and removed the species-specific ticks attached to them. Genomic DNA was extracted from individual ticks and used to explore overall bacterial load using pyrosequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA on 454-sequencing platform. The spotted fever group …

Environmental Regulation And Environmental Rights, Todd S. Aagaard

Faculty Publications

his essay, part of a symposium celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the Villanova Law Review, reflects on a 1971 article authored by Ferdinand Fernandez, who later would become a federal district court and then court of appeals judge. Fernandez’s article argued that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment creates a substantive individual right to state protection from pollution. Contrary to Fernandez’s prescriptions in 1971 at the advent of modern environmental law, legislation and regulation rather that constitutional litigation have come to dominate the environmental law landscape. In retrospect, this is not surprising. Legislatures and administrative agencies seem to …

“My Heart Falters, Fear Makes Me Tremble” (Isaiah 21:4 Niv): Emotions And Prophetic Writings In The Bible, Gerald A. Klingbeil, Chantal J. Klingbeil

Faculty Publications

"Emotions are an intricate part of what it means to be human. They are part of complex coping mechanisms installed by a Creator God whose own emotions are reflected in humanity’s creation in the imago Dei, the “image of God” (Gen. 1:27).¹ Joy, exuberance, anticipation, pleasure, delight, and happiness, must have all been part of God’s original make-up of humanity, for they characterize our existence today. We also experience, however, anger, sadness, sorrow, fear, depression, dejection, misery, and fury—emotions that became part of our emotive repertoire following the Fall in Genesis 3.²

Unfortunately, we have traditionally …

Toward A Theology Of Community., Jiří Moskala

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A General Elliptic Nonlinear System Of Two Functions With Application, Timothy Robertson, Joon Hyuk Kang

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to give a sufficient condition for the existence and nonexistence of positive solutions to a rather general type of elliptic system of the Dirichlet problem on the bounded domain Ω in Rn. Also considered are the effects of perturbations on the coexistence state and uniqueness. The techniques used in this paper are upper-lower solutions, eigenvalues of operators, maximum principles and spectrum estimates. The arguments also rely on some detailed properties for the solution of logistic equations. These results yield an algebraically computable criterion for the positive coexistence of competing species of animals in many …

Different Roads Lead To Rome: Integrative Taxonomic Approaches Lead To The Discovery Of Two New Lizard Lineages In The Liolaemus Montanus Group (Squamata: Liolaemidae), Cesar Aguilar, Perry L. Wood Jr., Mark C. Belk, Mike H. Duff, Jack W. Sites Jr.

Faculty Publications

Integrative taxonomy (IT) is becoming a preferred approach to delimiting species boundaries by including different empirical criteria. IT methods can be divided into two types of procedures both of which use multiple kinds of evidence: step-by-step approaches test hypotheses by sequential evaluation in a hypothetic-deductive framework, while model-based procedures delimit groups based on statistical information criteria. In this study we used a step-by-step approach and a Gaussian clustering (GC) method to test species boundaries in the northernmost species of the Liolaemus montanus group. We used different methods based on mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequence data, morphological measures and niche envelope …

Inversion Of Diffraction Data For Amorphous Materials, Anup Pandey, Parthapratim Biswas, D.A. Drabold

Faculty Publications

The general and practical inversion of diffraction data–producing a computer model correctly representing the material explored–is an important unsolved problem for disordered materials. Such modeling should proceed by using our full knowledge base, both from experiment and theory. In this paper, we describe a robust method to jointly exploit the power of ab initio atomistic simulation along with the information carried by diffraction data. The method is applied to two very different systems: amorphous silicon and two compositions of a solid electrolyte memory material silver-doped GeSe₃. The technique is easy to implement, is faster and yields results much …

Mechanosensory Signaling As A Potential Mode Of Communication During Social Interactions In Fishes, Julie M. Butler, Karen P. Maruska

Faculty Publications

© 2016. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd. Signals produced during social interactions convey crucial information about the sender's identity, quality, reproductive state and social status. Fishes can detect near-body water movements via the mechanosensory lateral line system, and this sense is used during several common fish behaviors, such as schooling, rheotaxis and predator-prey interactions. In addition, many fish behaviors, such as aggressive lateral displays and reproductive body quivers, involve fin and body motions that generate water movements that can be detected by the lateral line system of nearby fish. This mechanosensory system is well studied for its role …

Environmental Conditions Of 2 River Drainages Into The Northern Gulf Of Mexico During Successful Hatching Of Alabama Shad (Alosa Alabamae), Paul F. Mickle, Jacob F. Schaefer, Susan B. Adams, Brian R. Kreiser, William T. Slack

Faculty Publications

In recent years, the Alabama shad (Alosa alabamae) has experienced dramatic declines and extirpations from portions of its native range. Habitat degradation and barriers to migration are considered contributing factors to contraction in the distributional range this species. To identify conditions during successful spawning, river temperatures and discharges in 2 drainages of the northern Gulf of Mexico (the Apalachicola and Pascagoula rivers) were characterized during successful hatching “windows.” Sampling during 2005–2009 yielded 400 juvenile Alabama shad of which 261 were aged from counts of rings on sagittal otoliths. Results from logistic regression revealed that successful spawning coincided with increases in …

Goggatomy: A Method For Opening Small Cuticular Compartments In Arthropods For Physiological Experiments, Alan R. Kay, Davide Raccuglia, Jon Scholte, Elene Sivan-Loukianova, Chirstopher A. Barwacz, Steven R. Armstrong, C. Allan Guymon, Michael N. Nitabach, Daniel F. Eberl

Faculty Publications

Most sense organs of arthropods are ensconced in small exoskeletal compartments that hinder direct access to plasma membranes. We have developed a method for exposing live sensory and supporting cells in such structures. The technique uses a viscous light cured resin to embed and support the structure, which is then sliced with a sharp blade. We term the procedure a “goggatomy,” from the Khoisan word for a bug, gogga. To demonstrate the utility of the method we show that it can be used to expose the auditory chordotonal organs in the second antennal segment and the olfactory receptor neurons …

Effects Of Estradiol-17Β Or Dihydrotestosterone On Cell Types In Equine Pituitaries Staining For Prolactin, Growth Hormone, Or Both, M. Saeed Rahmanian, Donald L. Thompson

Faculty Publications

© 2016 Elsevier Inc. Ovariectomized pony mares were treated with vehicle (controls), estradiol-17β (estradiol), or dihydrotestosterone (DHT) daily for 21 days in summer, and the pituitary content of prolactin and growth hormone (GH) and the numbers of cells staining immunocytochemically for prolactin (lactotropes), GH (somatotropes), or both hormones (mammosomatotropes) were assessed. Treatments did not alter (P > .1) plasma prolactin concentrations over the 21 days. Estradiol treatment increased (P < .05) the pituitary content of prolactin several-fold relative to controls and DHT-treated ponies. The number of lactotropes was also increased (P < .05), as was the number of mammosomatotropes (P < .05). Treatment with DHT did not alter (P > .1) any prolactin characteristic. The number of somatotropes was not altered by either treatment (P > .1) nor was the pituitary content of GH (P > .1). Given that the mass of prolactin accumulation …

Multidimensional Solid-State Nmr Spectroscopy Of Plant Cell Walls, Tuo Wang, Pyae Phyo, Mei Hong

Faculty Publications

© 2016 Elsevier Inc. Plant biomass has become an important source of bio-renewable energy in modern society. The molecular structure of plant cell walls is difficult to characterize by most atomic-resolution techniques due to the insoluble and disordered nature of the cell wall. Solid-state NMR (SSNMR) spectroscopy is uniquely suited for studying native hydrated plant cell walls at the molecular level with chemical resolution. Significant progress has been made in the last five years to elucidate the molecular structures and interactions of cellulose and matrix polysaccharides in plant cell walls. These studies have focused on primary cell walls of growing …

Is Exposure To Macondo Oil Reflected In The Otolith Chemistry Of Marsh-Resident Fish?, Paola C. López-Duarte, F. Joel Fodrie, Olaf P. Jensen, Andrew Whitehead, Fernando Galvez, Benjamin Dubansky, Kenneth W. Able

Faculty Publications

© 2016 López-Duarte et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Genomic and physiological responses in Gulf killifish (Fundulus grandis) in the northern Gulf of Mexico have confirmed oil exposure of resident marsh fish following the Macondo blowout in 2010. Using these same fish, we evaluated otolith microchemistry as a method for assessing oil exposure history. Laser-ablation inductively-coupled-plasma mass spectrometry was used to analyze the chemical composition of sagittal otoliths to assess …

The Macroecology Of Infectious Diseases: A New Perspective On Global-Scale Drivers Of Pathogen Distributions And Impacts, Patrick R. Stephens, Sonia Altizer, Katherine F. Smith, A. Alonso Aguirre, James H. Brown, Sarah A. Budischak, James E. Byers, Tad A. Dallas, T. Jonathan Davies, John M. Drake, Vanessa O. Ezenwa, Maxwell J. Farrell, John L. Gittleman, Barbara A. Han, Shan Huang, Rebecca A. Hutchinson, Pieter Johnson, Charles L. Nunn, David Onstad, Andrew Park, Gonzalo M. Vazquez-Prokopec, John P. Schmidt, Robert Poulin

Faculty Publications

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/CNRS. Identifying drivers of infectious disease patterns and impacts at the broadest scales of organisation is one of the most crucial challenges for modern science, yet answers to many fundamental questions remain elusive. These include what factors commonly facilitate transmission of pathogens to novel host species, what drives variation in immune investment among host species, and more generally what drives global patterns of parasite diversity and distribution? Here we consider how the perspectives and tools of macroecology, a field that investigates patterns and processes at broad spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales, are expanding scientific …