Angola has experienced an incredible increase of the knowledge its herpetofauna over past decade. However, accurate biodiversity inventories remain deficient for certain regions particular conservation interest. We therefore provide updated checklist Iona National Park’s herpetofauna, with 75 recorded species, including five amphibians and 70 reptiles, 40 these first time in Park. The...

Seventy four SNP genotypes and 54 E. coli genomes from kangaroo, Tasmanian devil, reptile, cattle, dog, horse, duck, bird, fish, rodent, human and environmental water sources were screened for the presence of the CRISPR 2.1 loci flanked by cas2 and iap genes. CRISPR 2.1 regions were found in 49% of the strains analysed. The majority of human E. coli isolates lacked the CRISPR 2.1 locus. We desc...

The anatomy of reptile ears and eyes differ from that of mammals, and among different reptile groups. Species predilections exist for different Problems associated with the ears of reptiles include nodular swelling, discolored tympanum, head tilt, and circling. Problems of the eyes include pronounced or frequent blinking, periorbital swelling, blepharoedema (palpebral edema), buphthalmos (enlar...

Malaria parasites (genus Plasmodium) infect all classes of terrestrial vertebrates and display host specificity in their infections. It is therefore assumed that malaria parasites coevolved intimately with their hosts. Here, we propose a novel scenario of malaria parasite-host coevolution. A phylogenetic tree constructed using the malaria parasite mitochondrial genome reveals that the extant pr...

Assessments of radiation exposure of reptiles may be required in some countries as many species are protected. However, there are few data available for the transfer of radionuclides to them, especially in terrestrial ecosystems, and consequently, no specific peer reviewed reptile data have been used in the derivation of default transfer parameters in the ERICA Tool. Twenty samples of Lacerta a...

Integuments form the boundary between an organism and the environment. The evolution of novel developmental mechanisms in integuments and appendages allows animals to live in diverse ecological environments. Here we focus on amniotes. The major achievement for reptile skin is an adaptation to the land with the formation of a successful barrier. The stratum corneum enables this barrier to preven...

This paper considers meta-learning problems, where there is a distribution of tasks, and we would like to obtain an agent that performs well (i.e., learns quickly) when presented with a previously unseen task sampled from this distribution. We analyze a family of algorithms for learning a parameter initialization that can be fine-tuned quickly on a new task, using only firstorder derivatives fo...