Determining how competing species coexist is essential to understanding patterns of biodiversity. Indirect facilitation, in which a competitively dominant species exerts a positive effect on one competitor by more strongly suppressing a third, shared competitor, is a potentially potent yet understudied mechanism for competitive coexistence. Here we provide evidence for indirect facilitation in ...

When an ant colony needs to find a new nest, scouts are sent out to evaluate the suitability of potential sites, particularly their size. It has been suggested that ant scouts of Leptothorax albipennis use a simple heuristic known as Buffon’s needle to evaluate nest size. They do this in two stages: first laying a pheromone trail in the nest site, then, after a return to the old nest, coming ba...

The authors report a case of cutaneous tuberculosis in a 27-year-old African male medical intern who contracted primary cutaneous from a needle-stick injury. Cultures of pus aspirated from the finger initially grew Staphylococcus aureus that led to a delay in the diagnosis.

results in the first series, cellularity and blood levels were significantly lower in capillary-fnb compared with cfnb (p < 0.001 and p = 0.011, respectively). there was no significant difference between cfnb and vacfnb in cellularity and blood (p = 0.15 and p = 0.1, respectively). in the second series, cellularity was significantly higher in cfnb compared with vacfnb (p < 0.001) with no signif...

1 Departments of Parasitology and Public Health, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium, 2 Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 3 Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) UMR 177, Centre International de Recherche-Développement sur l’Elevage en zone Subhumide (CIRDES), Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, 4 Belgian Technical Coopera...

OBJECTIVE To study the spread of antibodies to V3 loop peptides of two chimpanzee lentiviruses and the divergent HIV-1ANT-70 isolate (group O) in human sera from different geographic regions, and to compare this with reactions to peptides from known North American (subtype B) and Zaïrean (subtype D) strains. METHODS A total 2495 HIV-1-antibody-positive sera from nine countries were tested by ...

Predator-prey interactions can affect the behaviour of the species involved, with consequences for population distribution and competitive interactions. Under predation pressure, potential prey may adopt evasive strategies. These responses can be costly and could impact population growth. As some prey species may be more affected than others, predation pressure could also alter the dynamics amo...

In African savannas, vertebrate herbivores are often identified as key determinants of plant growth, survivorship, and reproduction. However, plant reproduction is likely to be the product of responses to a suite of abiotic and biotic factors, including nutrient availability and interactions with antagonists and mutualists. In a relatively simple system, we examined the role of termites (which ...