1 Biology Department, Piedmont College, Demorest, GA, USA 2 Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA 3 Daniel B. Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA 4 Department of Biology, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA 5 Museum of Vertebrate Zoology & Department of Integrative Biology, University of California...

Although lizards have been predicted to show extensive intraoral prey-processing behaviors, quantitative analyses of the types of prey-processing behavior they demonstrate and of their kinematics have been limited. The more basal lizard lineages (Iguanians) have undergone some study, but the prey-processing repertoires of crown taxa have not been thoroughly examined and quantitative comparisons...

Pecan bacterial leaf scorch (PBLS) and the pathogen Xylella fastidiosa were identified in 20 pecan cultivars observed in Louisiana commercial orchards over a twoyear period. The disease occurred in the majority of orchards observed and was distributed throughout the pecan growing areas of the state. Leaf scorch was most prevalent in the Cape Fear cultivar. A few other cultivars sometimes exhibi...

Wide variation in reproductive success is common among amphibians that breed in seasonal ponds, but persistence of adults can buffer against these fluctuations, particularly for long-lived species. We hypothesized that the frequent episodes of catastrophic failure of the marbled salamander (Ambystoma opacum) enhance the importance of high terrestrial survival. At Rainbow Bay in South Carolina r...

A GIS model predicting the spatial distribution of terrestrial salamander abundance based on topography and forest age was developed using parameters derived from the literature. The model was tested by sampling salamander abundance across the full range of site conditions used in the model. A regression of the predictions of our GIS model against these sample data showed that the model has a m...

Animals often change their habitat throughout ontogeny; yet, the triggers for habitat transitions and how these correlate with developmental changes - e.g. physiological, morphological and behavioural - remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated how ontogenetic changes in body coloration and of the visual system relate to habitat transitions in a coral reef fish. Adult dusky dottybacks, Pseu...

Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) was isolated from a wild-caught Tsushima cat (Felis bengalensis euptilura), an endangered Japanese nondomestic subspecies of leopard cat (F. bengalensis). Phylogenetic analysis of the env gene sequences indicated that the FIV from the Tsushima cat belonged to a cluster of subtype D FIVs from domestic cats. FIVs from both the Tsushima cat and the domestic cat ...

This paper provides description of a new species, Cheirochela grossa sp. nov. from Yunnan Province. Cheirochela tonkina Polhemus, Polhemus & Sites, 2008, Heleocoris bengalensis montandoni Lundblad, 1933 and Thurselinus scutellaris (Stål, 1860) are reported from China for the first time. The checklist and a key to the species of Naucoridae of China are given. Dorsal habitus photographs of the sp...

Amji's salamander (Hynobius amjiensis) is a critically endangered species (IUCN Red List), which is endemic to mainland China. In the present study, five haplotypes were genotyped for the mtDNA cyt b gene in 45 specimens from three populations. Relatively low levels of haplotype diversity (h = 0.524) and nucleotide diversity (π = 0.00532) were detected. Analyses of the phylogenic structure of H...