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...

Pesce, G. L.: The Zinzulusa cave: an endangered biodiversity »hot spot« of South Italy. Nat. Croat., Vol. 10, No. 3., 207–212, 2001, Zagreb. The historical, geological, faunistic and ecological characteristics of the Zinzulusa cave (Castro Marina, South Italy), one of the most remarkable anchialine aquifers of Italy, are presented in this paper. The results of recent explorations and discoverie...

The morphologies and passive electrical parameters of fibres in two eye muscles of a surface- and a cave-dwelling crayfish were compared. In the cave-dwelling form the muscles contained fewer fibres, of less diameter, and hence had a smaller cross-sectional area. Current-voltage relationships were similar in both species. Input resistance was higher in the cave-dweller, but the difference was n...

*[email protected] 2007). In the last 50 years the cave suffered several microbiological crises (outbreak of microorganisms threatening the paintings) due to the invasion of the alga Bracteacoccus minor in 1963 (Lefèvre, 1974) and the fungus Fusarium solani in 2001 (Dupont et al., 2007). At present, the paintings are threatened by black stains produced by the fungus Ochroconis lascauxensis (M...