This paper is a brief survey of the role of temples and holy places in nurturing the surrounding flora and its habitat. Eightysix kinds of plants in temple yards and gardens of orissa have been enlisted where they are cultivated and preserved for different temple rituals. These plants are seen rarely in wild but are saved from extinction by their association with temple rituals and ceremonies.

When the work and reputation of scientists suffer ritual degradation, a range of tactics can be deployed to resist and rework the psychological and social impacts. Five key resistance tactics to degradation in science are revealing degradation rituals, redeeming the reputation of the targeted scientist, reframing the degradation as unfair, redirecting attention to other domains, and refusing to...

Despite the fact that sustainability of bushmeat hunting in tropical areas is of major concern for conservation and development practitioners, we still know very little about how to measure sustainability and how to put in place sustainable bushmeat hunting systems. We review the current limits of traditional methods used to investigate sustainability of bushmeat hunting, discuss the need to in...

Reestablishing feelings of control after experiencing uncertainty has long been considered a fundamental motive for human behavior. We propose that rituals (i.e., socially stipulated, causally opaque practices) provide a means for coping with the aversive feelings associated with randomness due to the perception of a connection between ritual action and a desired outcome. Two experiments were c...

Quantifying temporal changes in harvested populations is critical for applied and fundamental research. Unbiased data are required to detect true changes in phenotypic distribution or population size. Because of the difficulty of collecting detailed individual data from wild populations, data from hunting records are often used. Hunting records, however, may not represent a random sample of a p...

Hunting is often considered one of the major behaviors that shaped early hominids' evolution, along with the shift toward a drier and more open habitat. We suggest that a precise comparison of the hunting behavior of a species closely related to man might help us understand which aspects of hunting could be affected by environmental conditions. The hunting behavior of wild chimpanzees is discus...

Predatory and scavenging birds are at risk of lead exposure when they feed on animals injured or killed by lead ammunition. While lead ammunition has been banned from waterfowl hunting in North America for almost two decades, lead ammunition is still widely used for hunting big game and small game animals. In this study, we evaluated the association between big game hunting and blood lead conce...

Unsustainable bushmeat hunting is a major threat to mammal species, particularly in West/Central Africa. We developed a multispecies dynamic simulation model of hunter behaviour, parameterized using data from the Ashanti region, Ghana. The model distinguishes between two hunting techniques, snaring and gun hunting. We analyse the impact of key economic parameters on off-takes. Economic incentiv...

The current research addresses the psychological benefits of superstitious rituals in top sport, examining the circumstances under which top-class sportspersons are especially committed to enacting rituals prior to a game (ritual commitment). Consistent with the hypotheses, findings revealed that ritual commitment is greater when (a) uncertainty is high rather than low; and (b) importance of th...