Ecologists have long hypothesized that fragmentation of tropical landscapes reduces avian nest success. However, this hypothesis has not been rigorously assessed because of the difficulty of finding large numbers of well-hidden nests in tropical forests. Here we report that in the East Usambara Mountains in Tanzania, which are part of the Eastern Arc Mountains, a global biodiversity hotspot, th...

In eusocial Hymenoptera, females are more tolerant towards nest-mate than towards non-nest-mate females. In solitary Hymenoptera, females are generally aggressive towards any conspecific female. Field observations of the nest biology of Manuelia postica suggested nest-mate recognition. Experiments were performed involving two live interacting females or one live female interacting with a dead f...

background: the presence of metastatic lymph nodes is the most important prognostic factor for gastric carcinoma; however, the optimal system for the accurate staging of lymph node metastasis for patients with gastric cancer remains controversial. this study was designed to compare five systems in relation to the n classification of gastric carcinoma. materials and methods: this multicentric hi...

In human-modified environments, ecological traps may result from a preference for low-quality habitat where survival or reproductive success is lower than in high-quality habitat. It has often been shown that low reproductive success for birds in preferred habitat types was due to higher nest predator abundance. However, between-habitat differences in nest predation may only weakly correlate wi...

Nest attentiveness (percentage of time spent on the nest) during incubation represents a parent-offspring conflict; incubating birds must balance a trade-off between caring for embryos by staying on the nest versus caring for themselves by getting off the nest to forage. For species in which females are the sole incubator, males can potentially affect this trade-off and increase nest attentiven...

The concepts of free modules, projective modules, injective modules and the likeform an important area in module theory. The notion of free fuzzy modules was introducedby Muganda as an extension of free modules in the fuzzy context. Zahedi and Ameriintroduced the concept of projective and injective L-modules. In this paper we give analternate definition for projective L-modules. We prove that e...

let $r$ be a commutative ring with identity and $m$ be a finitely generated unital $r$-module. in this paper, first we give necessary and sufficient conditions that a finitely generated module to be a multiplication module. moreover, we investigate some conditions which imply that the module $m$ is the direct sum of some cyclic modules and free modules. then some properties of fitting ideals of...

Seasonal declines in avian clutch size are well documented, but seasonal variation in other reproductive parameters has received less attention. For example, the probability of complete brood mortality typically explains much of the variation in reproductive success and often varies seasonally, but we know little about the underlying cause of that variation. This oversight is surprising given t...

Breeding biology information, including nest survival estimates, are lacking for many nesting species in Puerto Rico. We studied the endemic Puerto Rican Bullfinch (Loxigilla portoricensis), and modeled daily nest survival to better understand the effects of several factors on daily nest survival. In 2009 and 2010 we monitored 37 bullfinch nests at two sites in southwestern Puerto Rico. Predati...

Alexander Skutch hypothesized that increased parental activity can increase the risk of nest predation. We tested this hypothesis using ten open-nesting bird species in Arizona, USA. Parental activity was greater during the nestling than incubation stage because parents visited the nest frequently to feed their young during the nestling stage. However, nest predation did not generally increase ...