To analyze the extent to which early flowering of specialized myrmecochorous plants (i.e. plants producing elaiosome-bearing seeds) may be the result of adaptation for ant dispersal, we investigated flowering and fruiting patterns of common herb and shrub-layer species in a beechwood forest at the western end of the Cantabrian Range (Spain). Over the same period, we estimated ant abundance, the...

Owing to complex direct and indirect effects, impacts of higher trophic levels on plants is poorly understood. In tropical agroecosystems, ants interact with crop mutualists and antagonists, but little is known about how this integrates into the final ecosystem service, crop yield. We combined ant exclusion and introduction of invasive and native-dominant species in cacao agroecosystems to test...

Increased knowledge of the present global carbon cycle is important for our ability to understand and to predict the future carbon cycle and global climate. Approximately half of the anthropogenic carbon released to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning is stored in the ocean, although distribution and regional fluxes of the ocean sink are debated. Estimates of anthropogenic carbon (C(ant)) i...

Dramatic improvements in DNA sequencing technologies have led to a more than 1,000-fold reduction in sequencing costs over the past five years. Genome-wide research approaches can thus now be applied beyond medically relevant questions to examine the molecular-genetic basis of behavior, development and unique life histories in almost any organism. A first step for an emerging model organism is ...

1. Del Toro, I., Ribbons, R., Pelini, S., 2012. The little things that run the world revisited: a review of ant-mediated ecosystem services and disservices (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Myrmecological News 17, 133–146. Google Scholar

Interspecific facultative mutualisms typically involve guilds of interacting species, and species within a guild can vary in the quality of services they provide. For plants that secrete extrafloral nectar (EFN), visitation by multiple ant species that vary in anti herbivore abilities may result in reduced benefits, relative to an exclusive association with a high-quality mutualist. This raises...

Fungus-growing ants, their cultivated fungi and the cultivar-attacking parasite Escovopsis coevolve as a complex community. Higher-level phylogenetic congruence of the symbionts suggests specialized long-term associations of host-parasite clades but reveals little about parasite specificity at finer scales of speciesspecies and genotype-genot5^e interactions. By coupling sequence and amplified ...

In this paper, we first introduce a generalized version of open shop scheduling (OSS), called generalized cyclic open shop scheduling (GCOSS) and then develop a hybrid method of metaheuristic to solve this problem. Open shop scheduling is concerned with processing n jobs on m machines, where each job has exactly m operations and operation i of each job has to be processed on machine i . However...

The antigen binding specificity of an antibody molecule is determined by the amino acid sequences of the variable (V) 1 regions of the heavy (H) and light (L) chains. The antibody repertoire of an individual is large and complex. The studies of antibody polypeptides and genes in mice have suggested three sources of diversity: multiple germline V genes (1-4), rearrangement of three sets of H cha...