Vegetation is sparsely distributed over Antarctica's ice-free ground, and distinct plant communities are present in each of the continent's 15 recently identified Antarctic Conservation Biogeographic Regions (ACBRs). With rapidly increasing human activity in Antarctica, terrestrial plant communities are at risk of damage or destruction by trampling, overland transport, and infrastructure constr...

Differences in level of herbivory can select for local adaptation and genetic differentiation of plant populations in different environments. Mean bulb depth of the desert lily Pancratium sickenbergeri, differs considerably among populations differing in the level of herbivory by the dorcas gazelle. The gazelle digs in the sand to remove most of the bulb of the lily. Deeper bulbs have less mate...

Procapra przewalskii (Büchner, 1891), commonly called Przewalski’s gazelle, is polytypic with 1 of the 2 subspecies (P. p. diversicornis) likely extinct. The species now occurs only in the Qinghai Lake region in northeastern Qinghai Province, western China, and predominately inhabits semiarid grassland steppe, stable sand dunes, and the desert–shrub ecotone between them. Numbers and distributio...

Emerging Bayesian analytical approaches offer increasingly sophisticated means of reconstructing historical population dynamics from genetic data, but have been little applied to scenarios involving demographic bottlenecks. Consequently, we analysed a large mitochondrial and microsatellite dataset from the Antarctic fur seal Arctocephalus gazella, a species subjected to one of the most extreme ...

There is growing evidence of escalating wildlife losses worldwide. Extreme wildlife losses have recently been documented for large parts of Africa, including western, Central and Eastern Africa. Here, we report extreme declines in wildlife and contemporaneous increase in livestock numbers in Kenya rangelands between 1977 and 2016. Our analysis uses systematic aerial monitoring survey data colle...

Eight wooden objects were found at Ohalo II, a submerged and well-preserved site in the Sea of Galilee, Israel. The fisher-hunter-gatherers' site has been radiometrically dated to 22,500-23,500 (cal BP) with 45 assays read by four laboratories. The wooden objects were found on brush-hut floors. They include a bark plank with polish and use signs, pencil-shaped specimens with longitudinal shavin...

Captive breeding of endangered species often aims at preserving genetic diversity and to avoid the harmful effects of inbreeding. However, deleterious alleles causing inbreeding depression can be purged when inbreeding persists over several generations. Despite its great importance both for evolutionary biology and for captive breeding programmes, few studies have addressed whether and to which...

A strain of equine herpesvirus type 1 (EHV-1) was isolated from zebra. This strain, called "zebra-borne EHV-1", was also isolated from an onager and a gazelle in zoological gardens in U.S.A. The full genome sequences of the 3 strains were determined. They shared 99% identities with each other, while they shared 98% and 95% identities with the horse derived EHV-1 and equine herpesvirus type 9, r...

The recovery of immature oocytes followed by in vitro maturation, fertilization and culture (IVMFC) allows the rescue of biological material of great genetic value for the establishment of genetic resource banks of endangered species. Studies exist on sperm cryopreservation of endangered Mohor gazelle (Gazella dama mhorr), but no work has been carried out yet on oocyte collection, fertilization...