Modern theory predicts that relative parental investment of the sexes in their young is a key factor responsible for sexual selection. Seahorses and pipefishes (family Syngnathidae) are extraordinary among fishes in their remarkable adaptations for paternal care and frequent occurrences of sex-role reversals (i.e., female-female competition for mates), offering exceptional opportunities to test...

Caffeine induced contracture in frog auricular muscle at room temperature when the muscle was exposed to a Ca-rich solution. The initial transient tension lasted 10-30 sec, and it was inhibited by procaine. It was dependent on caffeine concentration and the time of exposure to a Ca-rich solution prior to caffeine attack, but was little dependent on Ca concentration during caffeine contracture.

BACKGROUND Seahorses are endangered teleost fishes under increasing human pressures worldwide. In Brazil, marine conservationists and policy-makers are thus often skeptical about the viability of sustainable human-seahorse interactions. This study focuses on local ecological knowledge on seahorses and the implications of their non-lethal touristic use by a coastal community in northeastern Braz...

Bycatch studies have largely ignored population level effects on fish species of little commercial interest. Here we analyze bycatch of the lined seahorse (Hippocampus erectus) in the bait-shrimp trawl fishery in Hernando Beach, Florida, providing the first fisheries data for this species. Based on catch per unit of effort (CPUE), size, sex, and reproductive status of trawled H. erectus, 1) app...

Seahorses give birth to juveniles having a fully functional feeding apparatus, and juvenile feeding behaviour shows striking similarities to that of adults. However, a significant allometric growth of the snout is observed during which the snout shape changes from relatively short and broad in juveniles to relatively long and slender in adults. Since the shape of the buccal cavity is a critical...

Acoustic signals of the tiger-tail seahorse (Hippocampus comes) during feeding were studied using wavelet transform analysis. The seahorse "click" appears to be a compounded sound, comprising three acoustic components that likely come from two sound producing mechanisms. The click sound begins with a low-frequency precursor signal, followed by a sudden high-frequency spike that decays quickly, ...

Fly ash was collected as a byproduct from the processing of southern pine wood chips in a pilot-scale biomass gasifier. General properties of the fly ash were determined to assess its applicability as a soil amendment. Its alkaline pH (9.5) and high concentrations of Ca, K, and Mg suggest that it could be used as both a liming agent and a fertilizer. The concentrations of most heavy metals in a...

As juvenile life-history stages are subjected to strong selection, these stages often show levels of performance approaching those of adults, or show a disproportionately rapid increase of performance with age. Although testing performance capacity in aquatic suction feeders is often problematic, in pivot feeders such as seahorses models have been proposed to estimate whether snout length is op...

Background: Human tauopathy brain injections into the mouse induce development of tau aggregates, which spread to functionally connected regions; however, features this neurotoxicity remain unclear. One reason may be short observational periods because previous studies mostly used mutated-tau transgenic mice and needed complete study before these developed neurofibrillary tangles. Objective: To...

The tenacity of a graph G, T(G), is dened by T(G) = min{[|S|+τ(G-S)]/[ω(G-S)]}, where the minimum is taken over all vertex cutsets S of G. We dene τ(G - S) to be the number of the vertices in the largest component of the graph G - S, and ω(G - S) be the number of components of G - S.In this paper a lower bound for the tenacity T(G) of a graph with genus γ(G) is obtained using the graph's connec...