The effects of enhanced UV-B radiation were investigated in the carnivorous plant Pinguicula vulgaris in a field experiment performed in Abisko, North Sweden (68° 21« N, 18° 49« E, 380 m above sea level). Potted plants were exposed to either ambient or ambient plus supplemental UV-B radiation, simulating a 15% ozone depletion. No effect was observed on either the epicuticular (external) or cell...

The leafminer Tuta absoluta (Meyrick) is a major pest of the tomato crop and its development rate is known to decline when nitrogen availability for crop growth is limited. Because N limitation reduces plant primary metabolism but enhances secondary metabolism, one can infer that the slow larval development arises from lower leaf nutritive value and/or higher plant defence. As an attempt to stu...

Predators sample the available prey community when foraging; thus, changes in the environment may be reflected by changes in predator diet and foraging preferences. We examined Forster's tern (Sterna forsteri) prey species over an 11-year period by sampling approximately 10,000 prey fish returned to 17 breeding colonies in south San Francisco Bay, California. We compared the species composition...

Existing parameterizations tend to underpredict the α-pinene aerosol mass fraction (AMF) or yield by a factor of 2–5 at low organic aerosol concentrations (<5μg m−3). A wide range of smog chamber results obtained at various conditions (low/high NOx, presence/absence of UV radiation, dry/humid conditions, and temperatures ranging from 15–40C) collected by various research teams during the last d...

An 8-electrode capacitance tomography (ECT) sensor was built and used to measure moisture content (MC) and mass flow of pine chip flows. The device was capable of directly measuring total water quantity in a sample but was sensitive to both dry matter and moisture, and therefore required a second measurement of mass flow to calculate MC. Two means of calculating the mass flow were used: the fir...

Ehrlich ascites carcinoma cells from Swiss mice were treated with rabbit antiserum and rabbit normal serum in the presence of complement. The dry mass changes and cell size changes, as represented by cell area changes, were measured by the interference microscope with a half-shade eyepiece and an eyepiece micrometer. The antiscruin-treated cells were found to have a loss of at least 49.1 per ce...

In this work, an evaluation of the biological activities of Globularia alypum L. extracts and their global chemical composition was realized. Extracts from G. alypum were obtained by two extraction methods. The composition of polyphenols (8.5-139.95 g gallic acid equivalent/Kg of dry mass), tannins (1.39-18.65 g catechin equivalent/Kg of dry mass), anthocyanins (8.17-70.69 mg cyanidin equivalen...

The plant-growth-promoting rhizobacterium (PGPR) Y4-4 was isolated from plant rhizosphere soil and identified as Pantoea sp. by 16S rRNA sequence analysis. The effects of strain Y4-4 on alfalfa grown in heavy-metals-contaminated soil was investigated using a pot experiment. In a Cu-rich environment, the shoot dry mass and total dry mass of plants inoculated with strain Y4-4 increased by 22.6% a...

Understanding rumen–reticulum fill dynamics gives us insight into how environmental conditions influence animal behaviors that affect when animals access forage. We examined whether there were daytime declines in rumen–reticulum fill in response to high ambient temperatures in free-ranging white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus (Zimmermann, 1780)) on a diurnal scale. We hypothesized that to ...