During the main COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period of 2020 an impromptu set of pollination ecologists came together via social media and personal contacts to carry out standardised surveys of the flower visits and plants in their gardens. The surveys involved 67 rural, suburban and urban gardens, of various sizes, ranging from 61.18o North in Norway to 37.96o South in Australia and resulted in a data set of 25,174 rows long and comprising almost 47,000 visits to flowers, as well as records of plants that were not visited by pollinators. In this first publication from the project we present a brief description of the data and make it freely available for any researchers to use in the future, the only restriction being that they cite this paper in the first instance. As well as producing a data set that we hope will be widely used in the future, the project helped enormously with the health and mental wellbeing of the participants, a by-product of ecological field work that cannot be over-estimated.
During the main COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period of 2020 an impromptu set of pollination ecologists came together via social media and personal contacts to carry out standardised surveys of the flower visits and plants in their gardens. The surveys involved 67 rural, suburban and urban gardens, of various sizes, ranging from 61.18o North in Norway to 37.96o South in Australia and resulted in a data set of 25,174 rows long and comprising almost 47,000 visits to flowers, as well as records of plants that were not visited by pollinators. In this first publication from the project we present a brief description of the data and make it freely available for any researchers to use in the future, the only restriction being that they cite this paper in the first instance. As well as producing a data set that we hope will be widely used in the future, the project helped enormously with the health and mental wellbeing of the participants, a by-product of ecological field work that cannot be over-estimated.
1 Summary 1 2 Introduction 3 2.1 Circuses in context 4 3 Have animals in circuses been domesticated? 6 3.1 Summary 7 4 Animals in captivity 7 4.1 Summary 10 5 The health of captive animals 10 5.1 Summary 11 6 Captivity related stress 11 6.1 Reproduction in captivity 13 6.1.1 The effects of captivity-related stress on reproduction 13 6.1.2 Elephant reproduction 14 6.1.3 Carnivore reproduction 14 6.1.4 Primate reproduction 14 6.1.5 Ungulate reproduction 15 6.2 Summary 15 7 The effect of travel on animal welfare 15 7.1 The transport of reptiles 16 7.2 Do animals habituate to travelling? 16 7.3 Summary 17 8 The behaviour of captive wild animals 17 8.1 Time budgets 17 8.2 Stereotypies 18 8.3 Summary 21 9 Training and performance 21 9.1 Summary 22 10 How many wild animals are there in European circuses? 22 10.1 Summary 23 11 The origin of captive wild animals in circuses 23 11.1 Summary 23 12 Which species of animal are suitable for life in circuses? 23 13 Conclusions 23 14 References 24 15 Appendix I 33 16 Appendix II 34
Abstract Insect egg micropyles are openings through the chorion allowing sperm entry for fertilisation. Micropyles are diverse structures showing remarkable variation in number, spatial arrangement and physical structure across extant insect orders. Despite being almost ubiquitous across insects, they have received little attention. As key morphological features of an immobile life stage, it is plausible that part of the diversity exhibited by micropyles is adaptive, supporting other egg structures during embryo development. So, while egg fertilization is the primary function of micropyles, they could aid embryo development and be shaped by natural, as well as sexual selection. Here I first used ancestral reconstruction to investigate micropyle presence, number and variation in primitive insects. Then, I used phylogenetic comparative analyses to explore the ecological function of micropyle number. I hypothesised that micropyle number correlated with (1) aeropyle presence facilitating oxygen exchange; (2) aquatic oviposition supporting development in water and is influenced by (3) critical bioclimatic variables. Across 24 hexapod orders, the most likely ancestral state was one or two micropyles, interspecific variation was high and intraspecific variation was low. Mean micropyle number ranged from zero in Entognatha, Strepsiptera and Thysanoptera to 120 in Panstrongylus geniculatus , Hemiptera, and over 100 on average for Apidae, Hymenoptera. Micropyle number was strongly positively related to (1) egg size, with larger eggs having more micropyles; (2) the presence of aeropyles; (3) annual precipitation, with eggs developing in habitats with low annual precipitation exhibiting fewer micropyles; and (4) negatively related to micropyle width, insect eggs having fewer larger micropyles or numerous smaller ones. However, aquatic oviposition did not affect micropyle number. Overall these findings point to an adaptive ecological function of egg micropyles in addition to their primary fertilisation function. This is consistent with the hypothesis that micropyles aid embryo survival, and so this almost‐ubiquitous trait across insects is shaped by sexual and natural selection pressures during this critical life stage. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
I will conducting interviews with key natural, social, epidemiological and population health scientists about their views of valuing nature in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – in particular how natural capital mediates the use of antibiotics; source, maintenance and regulation of AMR.
During the main COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period of 2020 an impromptu set of pollination ecologists came together via social media and personal contacts to carry out standardised surveys of the flower visits and plants in their gardens. The surveys involved 67 rural, suburban and urban gardens, of various sizes, ranging from 61.18o North in Norway to 37.96o South in Australia and resulted in a data set of 25,174 rows long and comprising almost 47,000 visits to flowers, as well as records of plants that were not visited by pollinators. In this first publication from the project we present a brief description of the data and make it freely available for any researchers to use in the future, the only restriction being that they cite this paper in the first instance. As well as producing a data set that we hope will be widely used in the future, the project helped enormously with the health and mental wellbeing of the participants, a by-product of ecological field work that cannot be over-estimated.
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