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It is well established that the neurotransmitter serotonin participates in the control of sexual behaviour in the male rat. Recently, it has been found that serotonergic activity may either inhibit or facilitate sexual behaviour, depending on the subtypes of serotonin receptors involved. However, the participation of 5-HT2 receptors in the control of male rat copulation has received little experimental attention, and the published data are equivocal. In Experiments 1-4, it was established that the 5- HT2/1C agonist DCI inhibits sexual behaviour in male rats; this inhibition is effectively reversed by the antagonists ritanserin, pirenperone, and ketanserin. Comparison of these effects , with reference to the binding profiles of each drug, provided strong evidence that 5-HT2/1C receptors mediate an inhibitory influence on sexual behaviour in male rats. In addition, a tentative claim may be made that the effects of these drugs may be more attributable to 5-HT2 activity than 5-UT1C activity. ‘Wet dog shake’ behaviour in rats is known to be 5-HT2- dependent. Experiments 5—7 evaluated the novel proposition that the incidence of spontaneous wet dog shaking (WDS) by male rats in mating tests may provide a behavioural assay of concurrent 5—HT2 activity. WDS was found to be associated with copulatory inhibition in noncopulating males, compared to normal copulators, and this relationship was specific to mating situations. Activating 5-HT2/1C receptors with DOl simultaneously induced WDS and inhibited copulation. Thus, the incidence of spontaneous WDS in untreated males may reflect the function of a 5—HT2—mediated neural mechanism that tonically inhibits copulation in male rats. In Experiment 8, DOl microinjection in the nucleus raphe obscurus/inferior olivary complex also induced WDS and inhibited copulation. This suggests that the hypothesized 5- flT2-dependent inhibitory mechanism is vested in the ventromedial brainstem. Recent anatomical findings support this suggestion: cells in this region have bifurcating axons, projecting collaterally to both the medial preoptic area (implicated in sexual behaviour) and to the ventral cervical spinal cord (implicated in WDS). Overall, the results of the eight experiments provide strong evidence that 5-HT2 receptors mediate some of the inhibitory effects of serotonin on male rat sexual behaviour.

Electronically collected animal movement data has been analyzed either statistically or visually using generic geographical information systems. The area of statistical analysis in this field has made progress over the last decade. However, visualizing the movement and behavior remains an open research problem. We have designed and implemented an interactive visualization system, MarineVis, to visualize geospatial uncertainty in the trajectories of marine animals. Using MarineVis, researchers are able to access, analyze and visualize marine animal data and oceanographic data with a variety of approaches. In this thesis, we discuss the MarineVis design structure, rendering techniques, and other visualization techniques which are used by existing software such as IDV to which we compare and contrast the visualization features of our system. Finally, directions of future work related to MarineVis are proposed which will inspire others to further study the challenging but amazingly interesting and exciting research field of marine visualization. / Marine animal movement is a fundamental yet poorly understood process. One of the reasons is because our understanding of movement is affected by the measurement error during the observation and process noise. Differentiating real movement behavior from observation error in data remains difficult and challenging. Methods that acknowledge uncertainty in movement pathways when estimating constantly changing animal movement have been lacking until this time. However with the arrival of state-space models, this problem is partially solved as SSMs acknowledge this problem by allowing unobservable true states to be estimated from data observed with errors which arise from imprecise observations. State-space models use Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods which generate samples from a distribution by constructing a Markov Chain where the current state only depends on the immediately preceding state. The task of fitting SSMs to data is challenging and requires large computational effort and expertise in statistics. With the arrival of the WinBUGs software, this formidable task becomes relatively easy. Though using the WinBUGs software researchers try to visualize the tracks and behaviors, new problems appear. One of the problems is that when marine animals come back to certain places or animals' tracks cross each other several times, the tracks become cluttered and users are not able to understand the direction. Another problem of visualizing the confidence intervals generated using SSMs is that images generated using other systems are static in nature and therefore lack interactivity. Information becomes cluttered when too much data appear. Users are not able to differentiate tracks, confidence intervals or the information they would like to visualize. Acknowledging these, we have designed and implemented an interactive visualization system, MarineVis, where these problems are overcome. Using our system the confidence intervals generated using the SSMs, can be visualized more clearly and the direction of the turtle tracks can be understood easily. Our system does not occlude the underlying terrain as much because the glyphs are localized at the sample points rather than being spread out around the entire path. Our system encodes both direction and position rather than just position. Users can interactively limit the view of data points as a subset of available data points on a path, in clustered regions, to reduce congestion, and can animate the progression of the animal along its trajectory which is absent in existing approaches. All these results are visualized over NASA World Wind maps that facilitates the understanding of the tracks.

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This thesis examines animals in the fiction of John Irving and Haruki Murakami, two authors who have much in common, contemporaries whose work is both commercially successful and regarded as literary. Different in that Irving works within a traditional realist framework while Murakami delves into the magical, each includes animals in his fiction. They employ anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in a variety of ways and demonstrate how animals, as Claude Levi-Strauss puts it, are “good to think with”. I draw on the work of Erica Fudge in an overview of thinking with animals and examine the role of anthropomorphism and how it complements animal advocacy and liberationism in Irving’s Setting Free the Bears. I compare and contrast anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in The Hotel New Hampshire. In doing this, I complicate and challenge Wendy Doniger’s assertion that “sexuality makes humans into animals; language makes animals into humans”. This also applies to Murakami’s animals, who have further roles including enabling engagement with a magical dimension. I argue that, as instantiated in both writers’ fiction, animals evoke thought effectively largely because they are, as John Berger puts it, “both like and unlike”, and as Fudge identifies, that the “paradox of like and not like…exists in our fascination with animals”. My argument is that it is this very paradox, that they are simultaneously both “them” and “us”, along with other factors, such as the diversity, versatility and the inherent ambiguity of animals, that renders them fascinating. Furthermore, Murakami’s magically real animals link conceptual realms that are conventionally separate and facilitate criticism and challenging of conventional human hegemonic structures while operating outside national and cultural boundaries. In summary, Irving’s and Murakami’s animals are good to think with for many reasons, not despite their enigmatic furry ambiguity, but largely because of it.

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Bibliography: leaves 120-138. / xi, 138, [41] leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Characterises the 186 coliphage site-specific integration reaction in vitro with the expectation that it could be used in mammalian systems to insert genes or modify existing ones, to provide an alternative method for the production of transgenic livestock species. The analyzed system is the temperate bacteriophage 186. The in-vitro requirements for 186 integrative site-specific recombination were investigated. In vivo investigations were conducted whereby active 186-intasomes were microinjected into fertilised mouse eggs containing genomic copies of 186-attB. The 186 system has not been shown to work in vivo. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Biochemistry 1999?