The cuticle of Gordius panigettensis (Sciacchitano, 1955) was studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The cuticle is composed of 30-50 compact layers. The number of the layers is higher in the central part of the animal's body and decreases at the extremities. Each layer is composed of parallel tightly packed fibre...

Soft tissue preservation is reported from Upper Devonian deposits of the Holy Cross Mountains, central Poland, for the first time. The preserved soft tissues are muscles associated with arthropod cuticle fragments. The muscles are phosphatized with variable states of preservation. Well-preserved specimens display the typical banding of striated muscles. Other muscle fragments are highly degrade...

The highly conserved Wnt family of growth factors is essential for generating embryonic pattern in many animal species [1]. In the fruit fly Drosophila, most Wnt-mediated patterning is performed by a single family member, Wingless (Wg), acting through its receptors Frizzled (Fz) and DFrizzled2 (Dfz2). In the ventral embryonic epidermis, Wg signaling generates two different cell-fate decisions: ...

A model of bleeding due to clotting factor deficiency has been developed in dogs. Normal and hemophilic (factor VIII:C deficient) animals were used. Bleeding was induced in lightly anesthetized animals by severing the apex of the nail cuticle using a guillotine device. In normal animals, bleeding usually ceased spontaneously after 2-8 min. In contrast, in hemophilic animals, bleeding continued ...

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are increasingly used to solve many problems related to pattern recognition and object classification. In this paper, we report on a study using artificial neural networks to classify two kinds of animal fibers: merino and mohair. We have developed two different models, one extracting nine scale parameters with image processing, and the other using an unsupervis...

Female ticks of the family Ixodidae increase their mass up to 100-fold during the 7-10 day feeding period. We determined the material properties of the alloscutal cuticle of female Amblyomma hebraeum from the time of moulting through to full engorgement. The material properties of the cuticle were evaluated by a Kelvin-Voigt analysis of compliance determined from the stretch of loops of cuticle...

The neotropical flat bug species Dysodius lunatus and Dysodius magnus show a fascinating camouflage principle, as their appearance renders the animal hardly visible on the bark of trees. However, when getting wet due to rain, bark changes its colour and gets darker. In order to keep the camouflage effect, it seems that some Dysodius species benefit from their ability to hold a water film on the...

pasteuria penetrans is a bacterial parasite of some plant parasite of nematodes whichcan attach to the cuticle of nematode. differences in attachment of p. penetrans spores to the second stag juvenile (j2) cuticle may provide evidence for nematode cuticle diversity even between different ages of j2s. for investigating this purpose, we studied the effect of different ages of the same population ...

The initial infection process of nematode-trapping fungi is based on an interaction between the trapping structure of the fungus and the surface of the nematode cuticle. A bioassay was designed to investigate the predatory response of several isolates of nematode-trapping fungi against 3 mutants of Caenorhabditis elegans (AT6, AT10 and CL261), which have been reported to differ in the reaction ...

The cuticle is a proteinaceous layer covering the avian egg and is believed to form a defence to microorganism ingress. In birds that lay eggs in challenging environments, the cuticle is thicker, suggesting evolutionary pressure; however, in poultry, selection pressure for this trait has been removed because of artificial incubation. This study aimed to quantify cuticle deposition and to estima...