Bacteria and archaea sustain subsurface cave ecosystems by dominating primary production and fueling biogeochemical cyclings, despite the permanent darkness and shortage of nutrients. However, the heterogeneity and underlying mechanism of microbial diversity in caves, in particular those well connect to surface environment are largely unexplored. In this study, we examined the bacterial abundan...

in contemporary arabic literature recalling of quranic characters as the using of characters, events or historical periods in literary works are considered as the latest levels of connection between contemporary literature and his heritage. holy quran is one of the sources which its characters and stories have been used a lot in literature and this has resulted in the enrichment of literature. ...

Gammarus acherondytes is a rare amphipod endemic to Illinois subterranean streams. It previously was recorded from five cave streams in Monroe and St. Clair counties, Illinois. An examination of 164 caves from 1986 to 1995 produced only one new record, Madonnaville Cave, in Monroe County. These recent collections have documented a large population of G. acherondytes in Illinois Caverns, a moder...

Brazil's large territory displays significant richness in caves with about 12 thousand caves already recorded. Nevertheless, studies on bats in these environments are extremely scarce and fragmented. This study characterized the chiropteran fauna from two sandstone caves under the influence of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam (Belo Monte UHE) in Pará, Brazil. The Kararaô and Kararaô Novo caves ...

The European cave bear (Ursus spelaeus), which became extinct around 15,000 years ago, had several morphologically different forms. Most conspicuous of these were small Alpine cave bears found at elevations of 1,600 to 2,800 m. Whereas some paleontologists have considered these bears a distinct form, or even a distinct species, others have disputed this. By a combination of morphological and ge...

The Maya area is well endowed with cave art, one of the rarest art forms known in the world. Over 25 caves with paintings and handprints have been documented in a recent survey by the author, and an undetermined additional number contain carvings. In this paper, I outline regional differences in the corpus. For example, cave painting in the Puuc area of western Yucatan has a relatively coherent...

Distinct populations of Astyanax mexicanus cavefish offer striking examples of repeatable convergence or parallelism in their independent evolutions from surface to cave phenotypes. However, the extent to which the repeatability of evolution occurred at the genetic level remains poorly understood. To address this, we first characterized the genetic diversity of 518 single-nucleotide polymorphis...

Rare Late Pleistocene porcupine remains of Hystrix (Atherurus) brachyura Linnaeus 1758 are described from the Fuchsluken Cave, a small gypsum karst cavity at the Rote Berg on the Giebelstein near Saalfeld (Thuringia, Central Germany). The cave was used during the Eemian and mainly Early Weichselian (around 120.000-75.000 BP) by spotted hyena clans of Crocuta crocuta spelaea (Goldfuss 1823), whi...

Title of Document: HOW THE AVAILABILITY OF NUTRIENTS AND ENERGY INFLUENCE THE BIODIVERSITY OF CAVE ECOSYSTEMS Katie Schneider, Ph.D., 2009 Directed By: Dr. William F. Fagan, Professor, Department of Biology Resource constraints can affect species on multiple levels. In this dissertation, I combine laboratory experiments, an ecosystem-level manipulation experiment and statistical modeling to exa...

Surveying the internal structure of a cave is an important part of any archaeological or palaeontological investigation of a cave locality. However, the use of standard topographical surveying techniques is often difficult due both to the irregular nature of the structure and to the difficult working conditions. This study uses a novel method based on ultrasound reflections to produce an accura...