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Articles 1801 - 1830 of 2982

Full-Text Articles in Zoology

Insect Consciousness: Fine-Tuning The Hypothesis, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg Aug 2016

Insect Consciousness: Fine-Tuning The Hypothesis, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg

Animal Sentience

Although we are mostly supportive, we point out the strengths and weaknesses of Klein & Barron’s (2016) hypothesis that insects have the most basic form of consciousness. The strengths are in their application of Bjorn Merker’s vertebrate-derived ideas to arthropods, using their deep knowledge of insect brains. The weaknesses involve the controversial aspects of some of Merker’s ideas. We describe how the latter can be modified to strengthen the authors’ case for insect consciousness.

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Feel Or Perspective?, Mark Rowlands Aug 2016

Feel Or Perspective?, Mark Rowlands

Animal Sentience

The title of Klein & Barron’s well-argued and thought-provoking target article is, “Insects have the capacity for subjective experience.” However, they also frame their claim using the term “consciousness,” which they seem to take as equivalent to “subjective experience.” This assumed equivalence, I shall argue, is problematic in a way that might vitiate their central argument.

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Universal Modes Of Awareness? A “Pre-Reflective” Premise, Uta M. Jürgens Aug 2016

Universal Modes Of Awareness? A “Pre-Reflective” Premise, Uta M. Jürgens

Animal Sentience

Mark Rowlands holds that creatures endowed with pre-reflective awareness may qualify as persons: In pre-reflective awareness, the self and the unity of mental life are implicit in the stream of experience. Rowlands generalizes from an introspective analysis of pre-reflective consciousness in humans to pre-reflective awareness in general. I describe three examples of empirical findings that corroborate the assumption that animal minds have some of the same basic modes of pre-reflective awareness as human minds.

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What If Klein & Barron Are Right About Insect Sentience?, Bob Fischer Aug 2016

What If Klein & Barron Are Right About Insect Sentience?, Bob Fischer

Animal Sentience

If Klein & Barron are right, then insects may well be able to feel pain. If they can, then the standard approach to animal ethics generates some implausible results. Philosophers need to develop alternatives to this framework to avoid them.

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Subjective Experience And Moral Standing, Andy Lamey Aug 2016

Subjective Experience And Moral Standing, Andy Lamey

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron’s analysis focuses on the capacity for any subjective experience at all. It does not seek to demonstrate that insects can experience pleasure and pain in particular. This would be something of which insects have not traditionally been thought capable. If further research were to demonstrate that one or more insect species turn out to be conscious, yet incapable of experiencing pleasure and pain, it would give rise to a philosophical question that ethicists have yet to answer: Would a creature that is conscious, but lacks the capacity to feel pain, have moral standing?

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Is Cortex Necessary?, Sean Allen-Hermanson Aug 2016

Is Cortex Necessary?, Sean Allen-Hermanson

Animal Sentience

A key contention of Klein & Barron (2016) is that consciousness does not depend on cortical structures. A critical appraisal suggests they have overestimated the strength of their evidence.

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Who Is A Person? Whoever You Want It To Be, Gwen J. Broude Aug 2016

Who Is A Person? Whoever You Want It To Be, Gwen J. Broude

Animal Sentience

Rowlands provides an expanded definition of personhood that preserves the requirement of unity of mental life from the orthodox definition but argues that implicit unity of mind is sufficient for conferring personhood. This allows more or all animals to be considered persons. Implicit unity of mind may be a bridge too far for those who endorse the orthodox account of personhood, and for good reasons. More fundamentally, who gets to decide what personhood entails or that personhood per se matters to such other issues as who receives legal or moral status and consideration? Perhaps we should worry less about definitions …

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Are Insects Sentient?, Michael Tye Aug 2016

Are Insects Sentient?, Michael Tye

Animal Sentience

I comment on the methodology used by Klein & Barron for dealing with the question of insect sentience and I briefly make a proposal of my own. Once it is granted that insects are sentient, a further question arises: which insects are subject to which states of sentience? Do insects feel pain, for example? If so, which ones? On the further question, I note, Klein & Barron have nothing to say.

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Animal Grieving And Human Mourning, Matteo Colombo Aug 2016

Animal Grieving And Human Mourning, Matteo Colombo

Animal Sentience

King’s How animals grieve beautifully describes several ways in which animals and humans show a similar capacity for grief. Yet this book does not sufficiently emphasise the language-empowered capacity to objectify thinking and sentiments about death, which makes human mourning unique. Here I put this capacity into focus and relate it to the social-normative aspect of human mourning that seems to be missing in other animals.

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Insects Join The Consciousness Fray, Bjorn H. Merker Aug 2016

Insects Join The Consciousness Fray, Bjorn H. Merker

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron's review of recent insect neurobiology helps correct the impression that insect behavior is orchestrated without the benefit of central integrative mechanisms. Given their existence, the authors go on to ask whether these central mechanisms also feature the kind of integrative operations that support sentience, and propose that they do. Along the way they raise a number of conceptual and evidentiary issues of fundamental importance for the neuroscience of consciousness, allowing me to comment favorably on a number of them. I conclude by pointing to ways in which the conception of insect sentience they outline might be tested …

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Insects Have Agency But Probably Not Sentience Because They Lack Social Bonding, J. H. Van Hateren Aug 2016

Insects Have Agency But Probably Not Sentience Because They Lack Social Bonding, J. H. Van Hateren

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron (2016) argue that insects have sentience because of functional similarities between the insect brain and vertebrate midbrain. Based on a recent theory of agency and consciousness, I argue that the functional similarities merely point to an advanced form of agency. Insects presumably lack the capacity for social bonding that may be required for subjective experiencing.

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Cephalopods Are Best Candidates For Invertebrate Consciousness, Jennifer A. Mather, Claudio Carere Jul 2016

Cephalopods Are Best Candidates For Invertebrate Consciousness, Jennifer A. Mather, Claudio Carere

Animal Sentience

Insects might have been the first invertebrates to evolve sentience, but cephalopods were the first invertebrates to gain scientific recognition for it.

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Caterpillars, Consciousness And The Origins Of Mind, Arthur S. Reber Jul 2016

Caterpillars, Consciousness And The Origins Of Mind, Arthur S. Reber

Animal Sentience

A novel framework for the origins of consciousness and mind, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is presented. The model is based on a simple, perhaps radical axiom: subjectivity is an inherent feature of particular kinds of organic form. Experiential states, including those denoted as "mind" and "consciousness," are present in the most primitive species. The model has several conceptual and empirical virtues, among them: (a) it (re)solves the problem of how minds are created by brains ─ also known as the "Hard Problem" (Chalmers 1995) ─ by revealing that the apparent difficulty results from a category error, (b) it …

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Graemeloweus, A New Scorpion Genus From Northern California, Usa (Scorpiones: Vaejovidae), Michael E. Soleglad, Victor Fet, Matthew R. Graham, Richard F. Ayrey Jul 2016

Graemeloweus, A New Scorpion Genus From Northern California, Usa (Scorpiones: Vaejovidae), Michael E. Soleglad, Victor Fet, Matthew R. Graham, Richard F. Ayrey

Euscorpius

Genus Graemeloweus, gen. nov. (Scorpiones: Vaejovidae) is described from northern California, USA. The genus is composed of three species formerly placed in Pseudouroctonus: Graemeloweus iviei (Gertsch et Soleglad, 1972), comb. nov. (type species), G. glimmei (Hjelle, 1972), comb. nov., and G. maidu (Savary et Bryson, 2016), comb. nov. Major diagnostic characters of Graemeloweus include a non-bifurcated primary lamellar hook, the presence of a secondary lamellar hook, a complex mating plug with a two part base and an asymmetric crescent-shape barb, and the presence of a well-developed ventromedian (V2) carina on the pedipalp chela. Evidence is presented suggesting that …

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Scorpions Of The Horn Of Africa (Arachnida: Scorpiones). Part Vi. Compsobuthus Vachon, 1949 (Buthidae), With A Description Of C. Eritreaensis Sp. N., František Kovařík, Graeme Lowe, Jana Plíšková, František Šťáhlavský Jul 2016

Scorpions Of The Horn Of Africa (Arachnida: Scorpiones). Part Vi. Compsobuthus Vachon, 1949 (Buthidae), With A Description Of C. Eritreaensis Sp. N., František Kovařík, Graeme Lowe, Jana Plíšková, František Šťáhlavský

Euscorpius

All four Compsobuthus species of the Horn of Africa were newly collected, C. werneri firstly collected in Eritrea and C. eritreaensis sp. n. discovered during scorpiological expeditions in 2011–2016. Information is provided about their taxonomy, distribution, and ecology, fully complemented with color photos of live and preserved specimens, as well as their habitat. The hemispermatophore of C. eritreaensis sp. n. is illustrated and described. In addition to morphological analysis, we also describe the karyotype of C. eritreaensis sp. n. (2n=22).

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A New Species Of Diplocentrus (Scorpionidae: Diplocentrinae) From Western Izabal, Guatemala, Luis F. De Armas, Rony E. Trujillo Jul 2016

A New Species Of Diplocentrus (Scorpionidae: Diplocentrinae) From Western Izabal, Guatemala, Luis F. De Armas, Rony E. Trujillo

Euscorpius

Diplocentrus izabal sp. n. is herein described on basis to one male (holotype) and two females from El Estor municipality, Izabal department, eastern Guatemala. It seems to be a close relative of Diplocentrus lachua Armas, Trujillo & Agreda, 2012, from which it differs by having carapace almost smooth, with anteromedian notch V-shaped; pectines with 11 teeth in both sexes, and carapace clearly longer than pedipalp manus and metasomal segment V (D. lachua has carapace minutely granulate, with anteromedian notch U-shaped; pectines with 13 teeth in the males (female unknown), and carapace as long as both pedipalp manus and metasomal …

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Are Animals Persons?, Mark Rowlands Jul 2016

Are Animals Persons?, Mark Rowlands

Animal Sentience

It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category “person” is restricted to self-aware creatures: humans (above a certain age) and possibly some of the great apes and cetaceans. I argue that this orthodoxy should be rejected, because it rests on a mistaken conception of the kind of self-awareness relevant to personhood. Replacing this with a sense of self-awareness that is relevant requires us to accept that personhood is much more widely distributed through the animal kingdom.

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Utilitarianism Generalized To Include Animals, Yew-Kwang Ng Jul 2016

Utilitarianism Generalized To Include Animals, Yew-Kwang Ng

Animal Sentience

In response to the seventeen commentaries to date on my target article on reducing animal suffering, I propose that the term “welfarism” (when used pejoratively by animal advocates) should be qualified as “anthropocentric welfarism” so as to leave “welfarism” simpliciter to be used in its generic sense of efforts to improve conditions for those who need it. Welfarism in this benign sense — even in its specific utilitarian form (maximizing the sum total of net welfare) with long-term future effects and effects on others (including animals) appropriately taken into account — should be unobjectionable (even if not considered sufficient by …

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Cross-Species Mind-Reading, Stevan Harnad Jul 2016

Cross-Species Mind-Reading, Stevan Harnad

Animal Sentience

We can never be sure anyone else is sentient. But we can be sure enough in the case of other people, nonhuman primates, mammals, birds, fish, lower vertebrates and invertebrates as to make scepticism academic and otiose (not to mention monumentally cruel). The only genuinely uncertain kinds of cases are jellyfish, microbes and plants. The rest is not about whether but what they are feeling.

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My Orgasms Cannot Be Traded Off Against Others’ Agony, Stevan Harnad Jul 2016

My Orgasms Cannot Be Traded Off Against Others’ Agony, Stevan Harnad

Animal Sentience

Only I can calculate my own welfare as net pleasure minus pain. No one else can do that calculation for me – nor for a population, and especially not averaging across some individuals’ pleasure and other individuals’ pain. Pain and pleasure are incommensurable and only pain matters morally. To maximize welfare is to minimize pain.

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In Praise Of Fishes: Précis Of What A Fish Knows (Balcombe 2016), Jonathan Balcombe Jul 2016

In Praise Of Fishes: Précis Of What A Fish Knows (Balcombe 2016), Jonathan Balcombe

Animal Sentience

Our relationship to fishes in the modern era is deeply problematic. We kill and consume more of them than any other group of vertebrates. At the same time, advances in our knowledge of fishes and their capabilities are gaining speed. Fish species diversity exceeds that of all other vertebrates combined, with a wide range of sensory adaptations, some of them (e.g., geomagnetism, water pressure and movement detection, and communication via electricity) alien to our own sensory experience. The evidence for pain in fishes (despite persistent detractors) is strongly supported by anatomical, physiological and behavioral studies. It is likely that fishes …

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Sentience As Moral Consideration And Disvalue In Nature, Daniel Dorado Jul 2016

Sentience As Moral Consideration And Disvalue In Nature, Daniel Dorado

Animal Sentience

In recent work Ng assumes that it is good to engage in activities aimed at promoting ecosystem conservation. The only way Ng can derive this from the axiology he assumes (the view that wellbeing is the only intrinsically valuable or disvaluable thing) would be to assume that ecosystem conservation would benefit the individuals involved. This can be so as long as value prevails over disvalue in the target environments. Ng seems to assume this is indeed the case, but he does not explain why, and it is a claim that goes against the conclusions he has argued for previously (Ng …

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Inalienable Rights And Pluralism In Animal Advocacy, Beril Sözmen Jul 2016

Inalienable Rights And Pluralism In Animal Advocacy, Beril Sözmen

Animal Sentience

I comment on two of Ng’s suggestions. There is a lack of support for his suggestion that some experiments on individual animals will be useful for future success, so they should be permitted. I also question his recommendation that animal advocacy should focus on farmed animals first and wild animals later. The lack of solid support for why this would be a more effective strategy leads me to suggest a more pluralistic support of a variety of types of advocacy.

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Changing Attitudes Towards Animals In The Wild And Speciesism, Oscar Horta Jul 2016

Changing Attitudes Towards Animals In The Wild And Speciesism, Oscar Horta

Animal Sentience

I argue that despite Ng’s claim that we should postpone the defense of those animals that live in the wild, we do have reasons to start spreading concern for them now. We can do it by (i) changing public attitude by heightening awareness of speciesism, by which we will also challenge animal exploitation; and (ii) by disseminating information about the situation of animals in the wild.

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Proximate And Evolutionary Causes Of Sexual Size Dimorphism In The Crab Spider Mecaphesa Celer, Marie Claire Chelini Jul 2016

Proximate And Evolutionary Causes Of Sexual Size Dimorphism In The Crab Spider Mecaphesa Celer, Marie Claire Chelini

School of Biological Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Animal species’ body sizes result from the balance between selection for survival and selection for reproduction. In species with sexual size dimorphism (SSD), this balance differs between females and males, resulting in distinct sizes despite similar constraints. I used an integrative approach to understand how sexual section, and differences in developmental trajectories and metabolic physiology, resulted in the female biased SSD of the crab spider Mecaphesa celer (Thomisidae). SSD in spiders is often assumed to be a consequence of selection for early male maturation, which should provide males with additional mating opportunities. My results allow us to discard mate …

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Why We Should Not Postpone Awareness Of Wild Animal Suffering, Catia Faria Jun 2016

Why We Should Not Postpone Awareness Of Wild Animal Suffering, Catia Faria

Animal Sentience

Ng (2016) restates his case for the importance of wild animal suffering (1995). Nevertheless, he suggests that the most effective way to reduce nonhuman suffering overall is to give short-term priority to the suffering of farmed animals. It is not clear that Ng puts forward a successful case. Our current efforts to prevent animal suffering overall should also include raising awareness of wild animal suffering now as well as promoting research on safe and feasible ways to prevent wild animal suffering in the future.

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Scorpions Of The Horn Of Africa (Arachnida, Scorpiones). Part V. Two New Species Of Neobuthus Hirst, 1911 (Buthidae), From Ethiopia And Eritrea, Graeme Lowe, František Kovařík Jun 2016

Scorpions Of The Horn Of Africa (Arachnida, Scorpiones). Part V. Two New Species Of Neobuthus Hirst, 1911 (Buthidae), From Ethiopia And Eritrea, Graeme Lowe, František Kovařík

Euscorpius

New information about the taxonomy and distribution of the genus Neobuthus Hirst, 1911 (Scorpiones: Buthidae) is presented, based on materials recently collected from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Emended diagnoses are provided for the genus Neobuthus, and for the species N. awashensis Kovařík et Lowe, 2012 and N. cloudsleythompsoni Lourenço, 2001. New records are given for N. awashensis in Ethiopia. We redescribe N. cloudsleythompsoni, and we describe two additional new species: N. eritreaensis sp. n. (the first record of the genus from Eritrea) and N. kutcheri sp. n. (southern Ethiopia, Somali State). We include a key …

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Range-Wide Patterns Of Geographic Variation In Songs Of Golden-Crowned Sparrows (Zonotrichia Atricapilla), Daizaburo Shizuka, M Ross Lein, Glen Chilton Jun 2016

Range-Wide Patterns Of Geographic Variation In Songs Of Golden-Crowned Sparrows (Zonotrichia Atricapilla), Daizaburo Shizuka, M Ross Lein, Glen Chilton

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

Discrete geographic variation, or dialects, in songs of songbirds arise as a consequence of complex interactions between ecology and song learning. Four of the five species of Zonotrichia sparrows, including the model species White-crowned Sparrow (Z. leucophrys), have been studied with respect to the causes and consequences of geographic variation in song. Within White-crowned Sparrows, subspecies that migrate farther have larger range size of dialects. Here, we assessed geographic patterns of song variation in the fifth species of this genus, the Golden-crowned Sparrow (Z. atricapilla). We analyzed field-recorded songs from 2 sampling periods (1996–1998 and 2006–2013) …

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Description Of Mesocriconema Ericaceum N. Sp. (Nematoda: Criconematidae) And Notes On Other Nematode Species Discovered In An Ericaceous Heath Bald Community In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Usa, Thomas O. Powers, Peter Mullin, Rebecca Higgins, Timothy Harris, Kirsten S. Powers Jun 2016

Description Of Mesocriconema Ericaceum N. Sp. (Nematoda: Criconematidae) And Notes On Other Nematode Species Discovered In An Ericaceous Heath Bald Community In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Usa, Thomas O. Powers, Peter Mullin, Rebecca Higgins, Timothy Harris, Kirsten S. Powers

Department of Plant Pathology: Faculty Publications

A new species of Mesocriconema and a unique assemblage of plant-parasitic nematodes was discovered in a heath bald atop Brushy Mountain in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Mesocriconema ericaceum n. sp., a species with males, superficially resembles M. xenoplax. DNA barcoding with the mitochondrial COI gene provided evidence of the new species as a distinct lineage. SEM revealed significant variability in arrangement of labial submedian lobes, plates, and anterior and posterior annuli. Three other nematodes in the family Criconematidae were characterized from the heath bald. Ogma seymouri, when analyzed by statistical parsimony, established connections with isolates from north-eastern Atlantic …

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Neotype Designation For Scorpiops Pachmarhicus Bastawade, 1992 (Scorpiones: Euscorpiidae), With Redescription And Notes On The Species, Zeeshan A. Mirza, Gaurang Gowande May 2016

Neotype Designation For Scorpiops Pachmarhicus Bastawade, 1992 (Scorpiones: Euscorpiidae), With Redescription And Notes On The Species, Zeeshan A. Mirza, Gaurang Gowande

Euscorpius

Scorpiops pachmarhicus Bastawade, 1992 was described based on specimens collected from Pachmarhi, Madhya Pradesh. An expedition to the type locality led to discovery of a population at the type locality which permit us to designate a neotype for the species as types of the species are presently not traceable.

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