Whale carcasses create remarkable habitats in the deep-sea by producing concentrated sources of organic matter for a food-deprived biota as well as places of evolutionary novelty and biodiversity. Although many of the faunal patterns on whale falls have already been described, the biogeography of these communities is still poorly known especially from basins other than the NE Pacific Ocean. The...

Mitochondria are central regulators of cellular metabolism but how their function in a subset of cells affects whole-body energy balance is less understood. Two studies in this issue of Cell identify how diet-dependent modulation of mitochondrial fusion in specific neuronal circuits impact the metabolic status of an animal.

A whale became stranded in a well-known river in the east of England recently but all efforts to save it failed and the animal died. But this was not the northern bottlenose whale that entered the river Thames to a mass of publicity, but a young sperm whale that became trapped on sandbanks in the river Humber, 200 km further north, which attracted little media attention. The contrast serves as ...

The overall goal of this project was to improve our understanding of beaked whale distribution and foraging behavior and to describe inter-specific differences. We investigated spatio-temporal patterns for Cuvier’s beaked whale and a beaked whale producing echolocation signal type BW43 in the Southern California Bight using passive acoustic encounters, comparing data gathered from line transect...

In the sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) two different repeat types (A and B) of the common cetacean DNA satellite were identified. The evolution of each group of repeats appears to be independent from that of the other. The sequence similarity between the two groups is less than the similarity between group A and repeats of the satellite in related whale species. The systematic relationship...

Whale sharks attract large numbers of tourists, divers and snorkelers each year to South Ari Atoll in the Republic of Maldives. Yet without information regarding the use and economic extent of the attraction, it is difficult to prioritize conservation or implement effective management plans. We used empirical recreational data and generalized mixed statistical models to conduct the first econom...

1Despite the social emphasis in Multi-Agent Based Systems research, individual agent control systems (ACS) can not be discarded. The individual capacity for effective action selection and enforcement require agents with harmonised real-time and long-term capabilities. Neither the reactive nor deliberative paradigms seem to provide this harmony. We are proposing an ACS schema where longterm cond...

Tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) is a membrane-bound cytokine molecule that belongs to the family of tumor necrosis factor (TNF). TRAIL has been shown to be a potent apoptosis inducer in a wide variety of cancer cells in vitro and to limit tumor growth efficiently in vivo without damaging normal tissues. These features have focused considerable attention on TRAIL ...

Increasing nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms are applied to solving the real-world optimization problems, as they have some advantages over the classical methods of numerical optimization. This paper has proposed a new nature-inspired metaheuristic called Whale Swarm Algorithm for function optimization, which is inspired by the whales’ behavior of communicating with each other via ultras...

To assist in the species-level identification of stranded and hunted beaked whales, we compiled a database of 'reference' sequences from the mitochondrial DNA control region for 15 of the 20 described ziphiid species. Reference samples for eight species were obtained from stranded animals in New Zealand and South Australia. Sequences for a further seven species were obtained from a previously p...