BACKGROUND Schistosomiasis japonica is a parasitic disease that remains endemic in seven provinces in the People's Republic of China (P.R. China). One of the most important measures in the process of schistosomiasis elimination in P.R. China is control of Oncomelania hupensis, the unique intermediate host snail of Schistosoma japonicum. Compared with plains/swamp and lake regions, the hilly/mou...

Environmentally imposed selection pressures are well known to shape animal signals. Changes in these signals can result in recognition mismatches between individuals living in different habitats, leading to reproductive divergence and speciation. For example, numerous studies have shown that differences in avian song may be a potent prezygotic isolating mechanism. Typically, however, detailed s...

Marine and terrestrial regions are explored from many years and their bioactive compounds are being exploited. As the use of therapeutic novel compounds increases, researchers from all over the world started exploring oceans for bioactive compounds. Actinomycetes, filamentous bacteria have been extensively studied for their therapeutic compounds. They are found to occur in aquatic environments;...

The importance of behaviours as instigators or inhibitors of evolutionary change remains largely unresolved and this is in part because there are very few empirical examples of how behaviours affect evolutionary processes. By determining the environment of breeding, aggressive interactions over territories have the potential to strongly impact selection pressures experienced by individuals. Wes...

Wetland ecosystems provide multiple functions and services for the well-being of humans. In urban environments, planning and decision making about wetland restoration inevitably involves conflicting objectives, trade-offs, uncertainties and conflicting value judgments. This study applied trade-off and multi criteria decision analysis to analyze and quantify the explicit trade-offs between the s...

Foraging animals are influenced by the distribution of food resources and predation risk that both vary in space and time. These constraints likely shape trade-offs involving time, energy, nutrition, and predator avoidance leading to a sequence of locations visited by individuals. According to the marginal-value theorem (MVT), a central-place forager must either increase load size or energy con...

Inland vertebrate predators could enrich of nutrients the local top soils in the area surrounding their nests and dens by depositing faeces, urine, and prey remains and, thus, alter the dynamics of plant populations. Surprisingly, and in contrast with convincing evidence from coastal habitats, whether and how this phenomenon occurs in inland habitats is largely uncertain even though these habit...

In arid ecosystems, variation in precipitation causes broad-scale spatial heterogeneity in soil moisture, but differences in soil texture, development, and plant cover can also create substantial local soil moisture heterogeneity. The boundary between inland desert sand dunes and adjacent desert habitats exhibits abrupt changes in soil and vegetation characteristics that may be associated with ...

The occurrence of groundwater in Antarctica, particularly in the ice-free regions and along the coastal margins is poorly understood. Here we use an airborne transient electromagnetic (AEM) sensor to produce extensive imagery of resistivity beneath Taylor Valley. Regional-scale zones of low subsurface resistivity were detected that are inconsistent with the high resistivity of glacier ice or dr...