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Articles 1381 - 1410 of 2128

Full-Text Articles in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

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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Reflexivity: A First Demonstration, Melissa Jane Swisher Aug 2016

Reflexivity: A First Demonstration, Melissa Jane Swisher

Open Access Dissertations

Currently, the emergent relation of reflexivity after training a set of baseline relations has not been demonstrated with any animal—human or nonhuman. True reflexivity can only be demonstrated if no identity (i.e., physically matching stimulus) relations are trained. In six experiments, the emergence of reflexivity and its opposite, anti-reflexivity, were explored. Pigeons received concurrent successive matching training on two or three arbitrary tasks: AB hue-form and BC form-hue (and AC hue-hue) matching. Once they had acquired these tasks, they were tested for BB (form-form) reflexivity or BB’ (form-form) anti-reflexivity matching. Most (10 of 13) pigeons that received three arbitrary tasks …

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Analysis Of The Intricacies Of Substrate Recognition Of High Mobility Group Proteins And Aminoacyl-Trna Synthetases Using Non-Cognate Substrates, Douglas Van Iverson Ii Aug 2016

Analysis Of The Intricacies Of Substrate Recognition Of High Mobility Group Proteins And Aminoacyl-Trna Synthetases Using Non-Cognate Substrates, Douglas Van Iverson Ii

Dissertations

The studies presented in section 1 (Chapters I-IV) focus on the design and development of nucleic acid four-way junctions (4WJs) to target a member of the high mobility group (HMG) proteins, the proinflammatory cytokine high mobility group box 1 protein (HMGB1). In the present study, hybrid PNA-DNA 4WJs based on a model DNA 4WJ were constructed to improve the thermal stability of 4WJs while maintaining strong binding affinity toward HMGB1. An electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) was used to examine the binding affinity of an isolated DNA binding domain of HMGB1, the HMGB1 b-box (HMGB1b), toward a set of PNA-DNA …

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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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Animals Are Agents, Linda A.W. Brakel Jul 2016

Animals Are Agents, Linda A.W. Brakel

Animal Sentience

Mark Rowlands’s (2016) target article invites us to consider individuals in a broad subset of the non-human animal world as genuine persons. His account features animals reacting to salient environmental stimuli as Gibsonian affordances, which is indicative of “pre-reflective self-awareness.” He holds that such pre-reflective self-awareness is both “immune to error through misidentification” (Shoemaker, 1968) and a necessary precursor to reflective consciousness and personhood. I agree. In this commentary I hope to extend Rowlands’s work with a view in which agency is an even more fundamental precursor and one can (and should) consider individuals throughout the entire animal kingdom as …

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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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Implicit Mental Processes Are An Improbable Basis For Personhood, Michael L. Woodruff Jul 2016

Implicit Mental Processes Are An Improbable Basis For Personhood, Michael L. Woodruff

Animal Sentience

Rowlands argues that animals have implicit pre-reflective awareness and that this is adequate to create the unity of conscious thought required for personhood. For him pre-reflective awareness does not include intentionality and is probably an unconscious process. I suggest that his sense of implicit leads to significant difficulties for his argument and that including intentionality in the definition of a first-person perspective provides a stronger base for viewing animals as persons.

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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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Insects Have The Capacity For Subjective Experience, Colin Klein, Andrew B. Barron Jul 2016

Insects Have The Capacity For Subjective Experience, Colin Klein, Andrew B. Barron

Animal Sentience

To what degree are non-human animals conscious? We propose that the most meaningful way to approach this question is from the perspective of functional neurobiology. Here we focus on subjective experience, which is a basic awareness of the world without further reflection on that awareness. This is considered the most basic form of consciousness. Tellingly, this capacity is supported by the integrated midbrain and basal ganglia structures, which are among the oldest and most highly conserved brain systems in vertebrates. A reasonable inference is that the capacity for subjective experience is both widespread and evolutionarily old within the vertebrate lineage. …

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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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Molecular Response Of Spartina Alterniflora To The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Mariano Alvarez Jul 2016

Molecular Response Of Spartina Alterniflora To The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Mariano Alvarez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although the “genome as a blueprint” metaphor has been pervasive in biology, recent advances in molecular biology have revealed a complex network of regulatory machinery that dynamically regulated molecular processes in response to environmental conditions. However, these patterns, as well as the evolutionary processes that underlie them, remain understudied in natural conditions. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill released an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, making landfall on salt marsh habitat dominated by the foundation species Spartina alterniflora. Despite the severe impacts to phenotype and fitness, S. alterniflora proved remarkably resilient in …

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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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The Maintenance Of Phenotypic Divergence Through Sexual Selection: An Experimental Study In Barn Swallows Hirundo Rustica, Rebecca Safran, Yoni Vortman, Brittany R. Jenkins, Joanna K. Hubbard, Matt Wilkins, Rachel J. Bradley, Arnon Lotem Jul 2016

The Maintenance Of Phenotypic Divergence Through Sexual Selection: An Experimental Study In Barn Swallows Hirundo Rustica, Rebecca Safran, Yoni Vortman, Brittany R. Jenkins, Joanna K. Hubbard, Matt Wilkins, Rachel J. Bradley, Arnon Lotem

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

Previous studies have shown that sexual signals can rapidly diverge among closely related species. However, we lack experimental studies to demonstrate that differences in trait-associated reproductive performance maintain sexual trait differences between closely related populations, in support for a role of sexual selection in speciation. Populations of Northern Hemisphere distributed barn swallows Hirundo rustica are closely related, yet differ in two plumage-based traits: ventral color and length of the outermost tail feathers (streamers). Here we provide experimental evidence that manipulations of these traits result in different reproductive consequences in two subspecies of barn swallow: (H. r. erythrogaster in North …

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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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The North American Grouse: Their Biology And Behavior, Paul A. Johnsgard Jun 2016

The North American Grouse: Their Biology And Behavior, Paul A. Johnsgard

Zea E-Books Collection

The ten currently recognized species of grouse in North America have played an important role in America’s history, from the famous but ill-fated heath hen, a primary source of meat for the earliest New England immigrants, to the ruffed grouse, currently one of the most abundant and soughtafter upland game birds in more than 40 states and provinces. This book summarizes the ecology, reproductive biology, and social behavior of all ten of the extant North American grouse species. It also describes the current status of grouse populations, some of which are perilously close to extinction. The social behavior of grouse …

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Identification, Characterization, And Life Cycle Of Intein-Associated Homing Endonucleases, Joshua J. Skydel Jun 2016

Identification, Characterization, And Life Cycle Of Intein-Associated Homing Endonucleases, Joshua J. Skydel

Honors Scholar Theses

Inteins are molecular parasites that have been identified in unicellular organisms from the three domains of life. The intein self-excises following translation of the host gene, and therefore incurs a fitness cost for its carrier. The symbiotic state of the intein to its host is dependent on the presence or absence of a homing endonuclease domain, which facilitates horizontal transfer of the molecule. Identification of this domain provides information on the evolutionary history of the intein, as well as patterns of horizontal gene transfer in microbial communities. I have therefore developed Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to identify homing endonuclease domains …

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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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