Diamondback terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin) inhabit estuaries in eastern USA and may tolerate salinity of sea-water for short durations. Many North American estuaries are adversely affected by anthropogenic impacts, such as pollution, dredging and invasion by non-native plants. Many nesting areas have been altered or destroyed, causing terrapins to nest on roadsides and artificial islands made ...

Nesting habitat for the federally endangered loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) were designated as critical in 2014 for beaches along the Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Mexico. Nesting suitability is routinely determined based on site specific information. Given the expansive geographic location of the designated critical C. caretta nesting habitat and the highly dynamic coastal environment, u...

Nest building is an important and yet under-studied stage of the reproductive cycle in many taxa, including birds, and whilst we have a decent understanding of interspecific variation in avian nesting behaviors, our understanding of intraspecific variation in nesting behaviors is much less developed. This is largely because an insufficient number of studies have been performed on any one specie...

Invasive species often display different patterns of parasite burden and virulence compared to their native counterparts. These differences may be the result of variability in host-parasite co-evolutionary relationships, the occurrence of novel host-parasite encounters, or possibly innate differences in physiological responses to infection between invasive and native hosts. Here we examine the ...

Some chimpanzee populations exhibit ground night nesting, which occurs in different habitat types, is driven by a variety of interconnected factors, and may reflect cultural or social differences. This has important implications for ape conservation management, given that accurate nest builder identification is required to estimate density, crucial in monitoring, and allows inferences about env...

Protection Island, Washington, is one of the most important nesting sites for Glaucous-winged Gulls (Larus glaucescens) in the Puget Sound area. Changes in the numbers and distribution of nests in a Glaucous-winged Gull colony on Violet Point, Protection Island, were tracked from 1980 to 2010. The colony grew steadily until the early 1990s, then declined to about half its former level. The main...

We report the first evidence for a nesting colony of mesozoic birds on Gondwana: a fossil accumulation in Late Cretaceous rocks mapped and collected from within the campus of the National University of Comahue, Neuquén City, Patagonia (Argentina). Here, Cretaceous ornithothoracine birds, almost certainly Enanthiornithes, nested in an arid, shallow basinal environment among sand dunes close to a...

A hexagon quadrangle system of order n and index [HQS (n)] is a pair (X,H), where X is a finite set of n vertices and H is a collection of edge disjoint hexagon quadrangles (called blocks) which partitions the edge set of Kn, with vertex set X. A hexagon quadrangle system is said to be a 4-nesting [N(4) − HQS] if the collection of all the 4-cycles contained in the hexagon quadrangles is a /2-fo...

Efforts to model populations of the leatherback sea turtle Dermochelys coriacea and design appropriate conservation measures for this endangered species have been hindered by a lack of information on in-water (vs. nesting) population characteristics. We present the first synthesis of population characteristics of leatherbacks at high latitudes. During 8 seasons of fieldwork (1999 to 2006) off N...

Nesting problems are combinatorial optimisation problems where one or more pieces of material or space must be divided into smaller irregular pieces, minimising the waste. In OR, the state-of-the-art in nesting problems is to solve them by means of heuristic algorithms; the use of mixed integer programming models can handle only rather small instances. The satisfaction of geometric constraints ...