In many avian species, vocal repertoire expands and changes throughout life as new syllables are added and sounds adapted to neighbours and circumstances. Referential signals, on the other hand, demand stability and lack of variation so that their meaning can be understood by conspecifics at all times. It is not known how stable such signals may be when the context is changed entirely but the p...

The MAGPIE system has been designed and implemented to address the data management and analysis problems that arise during the interpretation of whole microbial genomes. The system consists of a command-driven query-answering interface and two cooperating daemons: (1) an active rule daemon that builds and maintains a knowledge base for a particular genome and (2) an annotated logic programming ...

In this paper we propose refocusing the research from knowledge portals towards frameworks, which the end user can apply in many decision-making scenarios and which we call ‘personal portals’. Rather than pouring resources into a centralised access to knowledge repository, we suggest a more distributed approach to accessing knowledge. The core facets of such approach include: • choice from mult...

Nesting density and synchrony by hosts may indirectly serve as a defense mechanism against brood parasites. Here we examine the relationships between spatial and temporal distribution of host nests and the probability of being parasitized. We use as host species the Black-billed Magpie (Pica pica), a species that is parasitized by the Great Spotted Cuckoo (Clamator glandark) in southern Europe....

Reproductive output from enlarged or reduced magpie broods showed that each female generally lays a clutch of optimal size. This size varies considerably between females. Approximately 85 percent of the within-years variation in clutch size was associated with differences between territories. Colonial bird species, lacking individual foraging territories, have a smaller clutch size variation th...

The azure-winged magpie (Cyanopica cyanus), has long presented a puzzle for biologists. The naturalist Alfred Wallace was one of the first to consider it. The puzzle lies in its extraordinary distribution. It exists in two distinct locations: Iberia and eastern Asia, 9,000 kilometres apart. Two alternative theories have been put forward to explain this curious distribution. The first proposes t...

Natural selection penalizes individuals that provide costly parental care to non-relatives. However, feedings to brood-parasitic fledglings by individuals other than their foster parents, although anecdotic, have been commonly observed, also in the great spotted cuckoo (Clamator glandarius)--magpie (Pica pica) system, but this behaviour has never been studied in depth. In a first experiment, we...