Selective brain cooling is a thermoregulatory effector proposed to conserve body water and, as such, may help artiodactyls cope with aridity. We measured brain and carotid blood temperature, using implanted data loggers, in five Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) in the desert of Saudi Arabia. On average, brain temperature was 0.24±0.05°C lower than carotid blood temperature for four oryx in April. S...

Understanding the behavioral adaptations and subsistence strategies of Middle Paleolithic humans is critical in the debate over the evolution and manifestations of modern human behavior. The study of faunal remains plays a central role in this context. Until now, the majority of Levantine archaeofaunal evidence was derived from late Middle Paleolithic sites. The discovery of faunal remains from...

We carried out a detailed taphonomic study of the faunal remains from Nahal Hadera V (NHV), a large Kebaran open-air site on the northern coastal plain, Israel. Faunal remains were previously identified to bone element and species (Saxon, Martin & Bar-Yosef, 1978). However, NISP and MNI values were calculated based on teeth and epiphyses only. In this study we identified the maximum number of s...

Herbivores are major drivers of ecosystem structure, diversity, and function. Resilient ecosystems therefore require viable herbivore populations in a sustainable balance with environmental resource availability. This balance is becoming harder to achieve, with increasingly threatened species reliant on small protected areas in increasingly harsh and unpredictable environments. Arid environment...

Sequence pattern mining aims to discover frequent subsequences as patterns in a single sequence or a sequence database. By combining gap constraints (or flexible wildcards), users can specify special characteristics of the patterns and discover meaningful subsequences suitable for their own application domains, such as finding gene transcription sites from DNA sequences or discovering patterns ...

Individual specialization is widespread among wild populations. While its fitness consequences are central in predicting the ecological and evolutionary trajectories of populations, they remain poorly understood. Long-term individual foraging specializations occur in male Antarctic (Arctocephalus gazella) and Australian (A. pusillus doriferus) fur seals. Strong selective pressure is expected in...

Parasites are ubiquitous components of the environment that contribute to behavioural and life-history variation among hosts. Although it is well known that host behaviour can affect parasite infection risk and that parasites can alter host behaviour, the potential for dynamic feedback between these processes is poorly characterized. Using Grant's gazelle (Nanger granti) as a model, we tested f...

Although heterozygosity-fitness correlations (HFCs) are widely reported in the literature, most studies use too few markers to allow the proximate mechanisms to be convincingly resolved. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed: the general effect hypothesis, in which marker heterozygosity correlates with genome-wide heterozygosity and hence the inbreeding coefficient f, and the local effect...