Throughout their lives, animals are faced with numerous ecological challenges stemming from abiotic and biotic conditions of their environment. Phenotypic shifts in response to one challenge can have cascading effects on other organismal systems, with downstream implications for individual fitness. Infectious disease presents a significant ecological challenge for most organisms on earth. Additionally, how an animal responds to disease can be shifted by exposure to other ecological challenges. Thus, infectious disease can both present an ecological challenge itself or shift as a consequence of another challenge. In this work, I used experimental captive studies on wild-caught house finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) to elucidate how an animal might shift its phenotypes when presented with an ecological challenge. In the first experiment, I examined how nutritional stress during nestling development impacted the magnitude of house finch responses to the bacterial pathogen Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG). Although nutritional stress limited mass gain in nestlings, individual responses to MG did not vary with nutritional stress, possibly indicating that the development of immune responses is resilient even in the face of suboptimal nutritional conditions. Next, I investigated infectious disease as a challenge in itself and asked how individual social preferences were shifted by MG infection. I demonstrated that MG-infected house finches showed augmented sociality relative to control birds, choosing to spend more time with a group of conspecifics than alone. Because this increased social preference was no longer present once birds recovered, this phenotypic change in sociality may have specific benefits for actively infected birds. Finally, my last experiment expands upon these results, exploring whether group-living particularly benefits infected birds by offsetting two common fitness costs of infection: reduced foraging abilities and decreased anti-predator responses. Here we found that group-living provides all individuals with improved foraging and anti-predator behaviors, with the strongest benefits of group-living apparent for infected finches. This suggests that augmented sociality in infected house finches has important implications for surviving infection, and potentially, for the spread of MG within populations. As animals continue to face increasing and novel ecological challenges, it is vitally important to understand individual responses to environmental challenges, which can have long-term effects for all levels of biological organization. In particular, my work highlights the role of social behavior as a potentially adaptive phenotypic response to infectious disease in wild animals. Taken together, my results demonstrate the importance of continuing to study infectious disease from multiple perspectives to better understand how animals will respond to a shifting world. / Doctor of Philosophy / All animals must respond to challenges in their environment, which can impact their lives in a variety of ways. Infectious disease is a significant challenge for most organisms on earth. Infection with a disease-causing pathogen must be met by the individual with behavioral, physiological, and immunological responses to increase the animal's likelihood of survival. Additionally, an animal's response to disease can be shifted by exposure to other adverse environmental conditions, such as reduced access to food. On the one hand, infectious disease can present a challenge in itself. Alternatively, how an animal responds to disease may shift as a consequence of another challenge. In this work, I brought wild-caught birds into a captive setting and performed three experiments to determine how an animal might respond to common ecological challenges. First, I studied how food shortages during early life impacted how strongly birds responded to infection with a disease-causing bacteria. In this study I found that host responses to disease did not shift, even when birds were given less food and experienced reduced mass growth during early life. Although young animals are developing rapidly and are particularly vulnerable to challenges in their environment, my results indicate that the development of responses to disease is resilient even in the face of suboptimal conditions. Next, I investigated how social behaviors were shifted due to disease. Here I demonstrated that diseased birds were more social than healthy birds, preferring to spend more time with a group of other birds than alone. In contrast, once these same birds had recovered from infection and were again healthy they became less social, which suggests that diseased birds in particular may benefit from being part of a group. My final experiment expanded upon these results, exploring whether group-living can help increase an individual's survival by compensating for two consequences of disease: reduced ability to acquire food and evade predators. Here I found that group-living provides individual benefits in terms of both acquiring food and evading predators, both of which have important implications for an individual's survival, especially while experiencing disease. As animals continue to face increasing and new challenges due to global change, it becomes vitally important to understand individual responses to environmental changes. While the work highlighted here presents an important step in understanding individual responses, future work should use observational studies in the wild to determine how the social preferences and behaviors I demonstrated here are actually occurring in a natural habitat. Taken together, my results highlight the importance of continuing to study infectious disease from multiple perspectives to better understand how animals will respond to a shifting world.

Network science emerged as an interdisciplinary field over the last 20 years, and played a central role to address fundamental problems in other fields, e.g., epidemiology, public health, and transportation, and is now part of most university curriculums. Network dynamics is a major area within network science where researchers study different forms of processes in networked populations, such as the spread of emotions, influence, opinions, flu, ebola, and mass movements. These processes often referred to individually and collectively as contagions. Contagions are increasingly studied because of their economic, social, and political impacts. Yet, resources for studying network dynamics are largely dispersed and stand-alone. Furthermore, many researchers interested in the study of networks are not computer scientists. As a result, they do not have easy access to computing and data resources. Even with the presence of software or tools, it is challenging to install, build, and maintain software. These challenges create a barrier for researchers and domain scientists. The goal of this work is the design and implementation of a research framework for modeling contagions on large networked populations. The framework consists of various systems and services that provide support for researchers and domain scientists at different stages of their research workflow. / Ph. D. / Network science is a field which studies complex networks. Network science emerged over the last 20 years as an interdisciplinary academic field which integrates data, tools, and theories from multiple disciplines, and use this integration to address fundamental problems in other fields, e.g., epidemiology, public health, and transportation, and is now part of most university curriculums. Network dynamics is a major area within network science where researchers study different forms of processes in networked populations, such as the spread of emotions, influence, opinions, flu, ebola, and mass movements. These processes often referred to individually and collectively as contagions. Contagions are increasingly studied because of their economic, social, and political impacts. To study contagions, researchers and domain scientists need both software and hardware that can collect, analyze, and manage large volumes of networked data. Furthermore, for non-computer scientists, it is more challenging to install, build, and maintain the software with the required hardware. These challenges create a barrier for researchers and domain scientists to conduct their experiments and replicate others’ work. The goal of this work is the design and implementation of various systems and services that provide support for researchers and domain scientists at different stages of their research workflow.

Um zu verstehen, wie das Gehirn von Säugetieren funktioniert, untersuchen wir wie neuronale Aktivität einerseits zu Kognition beträgt und andererseits komplexe Verhaltensweisen ermöglicht. Im Fokus dieser Doktorarbeit stehen dabei zwei Regionen der Großhirnrinde der Ratte: der parahippocampale Cortex und der motorische Cortex. Im ersten Teil haben wir neuronale Schaltkreise im parahippocampalen Cortex und in den oberen Schichten des enthorhinalen Cortex untersucht, während Ratten ihre Umgebung räumlich erkunden. Diese beiden Regionen tragen wesentlich zum Orientierungssinn bei. Dabei haben wir herausgefunden, dass anatomische Identität und Einbindung in den Microschaltkreis einerseits räumliche neuronale Signale, wie zum Beispiel der Aktivität von grid cells, border cells und head-direction cells, bestimmen. Andererseits tragen diese beiden Eigenschaften auch zur temporalen Präzision neuronaler Signale bei, wie zum Beispiel in Form von spike bursts, theta Modulation und phase precession. Im zweiten Teil dieser Doktorarbeit untersuchen wir die Aktivität von Neuronen im Vibrissen Motorcortex während komplexer Bewegungsabläufe der Schnurrhaare, die dem natürlichen Repertoire der Ratte entstammen: eigeninitiierte Bewegungen in freier Luft, Berührung von Artgenossen zur sozialen Interaktion und das Abtasten von Objekten. Dabei haben wir herausgefunden, dass neuronale Aktivität im Motorcortex während der Bewegung der Schnurrhaare unterdrückt ist, dass elektrische Microstimulation zum Rückzug der Schnurrhaare führt und, dass pharmakologische Blockade Bewegung der Schnurrhaare fördert. Um diese überraschende Beobachtung in einen breiteren Kontext zu integrieren, endet dieser Teil mit einer Bewertung der Literatur zu der bewegungsunterdrückenden Wirkung von Motorcortex Aktivität bei Nagetieren, Primaten und Menschen. / In order to understand how the mammalian brain works, we must investigate how neural activity contributes to cognition and generates complex behavioral output. In this thesis I present work, which focuses on two regions of the cerebral cortex of rats: parahippocampal cortex and motor cortex. In the first part of the thesis we investigate neural circuits in the parasubiculum and the superficial medial enthorhinal cortex, two structures that play a key role in spatial cognition. Briefly, we find that the in these regions, anatomical identity and microcircuit embedding is a major determinant of both spatial discharge patterns (such as the discharge patterns of grid cells, border cells and head-direction cells) and temporal coding features (such as spike bursts, theta-modulation and phase precession). In the second part of the thesis we investigate the activity of neurons in vibrissa motor cortex during complex motor behaviors, which play a vital role in rat ecology: self-initiated bouts of exploratory whisking in air, whisking to touch conspecifics during social interactions and whisking to palpate objects. Briefly, we find that neural activity decreases during whisking behaviors, that microstimulation leads to whisker retraction and that pharmacological blockade increases whisker movement. Thus, our observations collectively suggest that a primary role of vibrissa motor cortex activity is to suppress whisking behaviors. The second part of the thesis concludes with a literature review of motor suppressive effects of motor cortical activity across rodents, primates and humans to put this unexpected finding in a broader context.

Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellten Arbeiten zielten darauf ab, verschiedene Formen des Lernens und der Verhaltensanpassung in Tieren zu testen. Hierbei wurder der Großteil dieser Arbeit an einer natürlich vorkommenden klonalen Fischart, der Amazonas-Molly Poecilia formosa, durchgeführt. Diese gesellige, ausschließlich weibliche Art erzeugt durch ungeschlechtliche Fortpflanzung genetisch identische Nachkommen. Mit dem Aufkommen von immer detaillierteren Ansätzen zur Unterscheidung von Verhaltensunterschieden sind solche klonalen Arten in der Ethologie von entscheidender Bedeutung, da sie als perfektes natürliches Modell dienen, um individuelle Verhaltensunterschiede und deren Entwicklung zu testen. Da genetische Variationen als Störfaktor weitgehend ausgeschlossen werden können, kann die Aufmerksamkeit auf die Unterschiede zwischen Individuen aufgrund ihrer Vorerfahrungen gelenkt werden. In den ersten drei Kapiteln der hier vorgestellten Arbeit wurden die individuellen Erfahrungen durch operante Konditionierung oder durch das Aussetzen der Tiere gegenüber neuen oder bekannten Situationen verändert. Das jeweilige Verhalten wurde sowohl alleine, als auch im sozialen Kontext untersucht. Auf diese Weise wurde die Auswirkung des sozialen Kontexts sowie der physischen Umgebung auf Verhaltensaspekte wie Schwimmgeschwindigkeit und Sprungwahrscheinlichkeit ermittelt. Kleinere Verhaltensunterschiede wurden dann im folgenden Kapitel durch den Vergleich von manuellen Ansätzen und automatischen Quantifizierungsinstrumenten bewertet und evaluiert. Schließlich wurde ein methodischer Ansatz augearbeitet, bei dem die Leistungsfähigkeit künstlicher intelligenz in Form von neuronalen Netze genutzt wurde, um Individuen in komplizierten, natürlichen Szenen während Räuber-Beute-Interaktionen zu verfolgen. / The work presented in this thesis set out to test various forms of learning and behavior adaptation. The bulk of this work was done using a naturally occurring clonal fish species, the Amazon molly Poecilia formosa. This sociable, all female species produces genetically identical offspring through asexual reproduction. With the advent of increasingly detailed approaches to discriminate behavioral differences, such clonal species are vital in ethology as they serve as a perfect natural model to test for individual behavioral differences and the development of such. Since genetical variation can largely be excluded as a confounding factor, attention can be drawn towards the differences among individuals due to their prior experience. In the first three chapters of the work presented here, the individual information and experience was altered by applying operant conditioning or by exposing the animals to novel or well-known situations. This was done both individually and in a group setting. By doing so, the effect of the social context, as well as the physical surroundings on behavioral aspects such as swimming speed and jumping probability was determined. Minute behavioral differences were then evaluated in the following chapter by comparing manual approaches and automated quantification tools. Lastly, a methodological approach was taken in which the power of artifical neural networks was harnessed to track individuals in convoluted natural scenes during predator-prey interactions.

Master of Science / Department of Entomology / Srinivas Kambhampati / Termites (Isoptera) are eusocial insects and exhibit highly complex eusocial behavior. Eusociality is characterized by the presence of castes (workers, soldiers, reproductives), polyphenisms (same genotype exhibiting multiple phenotypes), flexible developmental pathways, complex communication, cooperative brood care, construction and maintenance of complex nests, and division of labor. Previous studies on honey bees implicated several genes in caste-specific behavior; here, we investigate if orthologs of such genes are present in termites and if so, whether they are expressed differentially among the castes. A candidate gene approach using degenerate primers was used to amplify three candidate genes in the termite Reticulitermes flavipes. Quantitative real time PCR analysis revealed differential expression among termite workers, soldiers, and alates, with a general pattern of higher expression in alates. These results provide information on three novel genes in the termite R. flavipes.

The Canary Archipelago is considered one of the planet's biodiversity hotspots and the short-finned pilot whale is a key species in need of conservation measures. To address a lack of knowledge, almost 2,000 day-surveys were conducted (1999-2012) resulting in 1,094 short-finned pilot whale sightings. The species was recorded year-round and distributed non-uniformly around the archipelago, with greater densities concentrated in patchy areas mainly on the leeward side of the main islands. A total of 1,320 well-marked individuals were identified, which exhibited a large degree of variability in site fidelity (from core residents to transients). Evidence of an island-associated sub-population and a transient one was found. Longitudinal data were used to infer population structure and estimate abundance, while a spatial modelling approach was used to study spatio-temporal patterns in habitat use, distribution and abundance. Spatial modelling revealed habitat preferences in areas between depths of 1000m and 1500m, and higher densities in the south-west of Tenerife and La Gomera (117 short-finned pilot whales recaptured within the two islands). Abundance of 1,980 individuals (CV = 0.33, 95% CI=1,442 – 2,324) was estimated for the entire archipelago, with higher density predicted during the summer months. Mark-recapture analysis estimated 636 resident individuals (CV = 0.028, 95% CI=602 - 671) in the southwest waters of Tenerife between 2007 and 2009. The social and temporal analyses of the behavioural relationships between pairs of individuals revealed a well-differentiated society with long-lasting and non-random social structure built of constant companions. A hierarchical social system is proposed composed of a population encompassing several clans of pilot whales, each one containing several pods. Nine long-term units were identified with a high degree of association (0.62 - 0.83). This study, the first to provide combined results on distribution, habitat use, and social structure of the species, provides essential information towards the development of recommendations for much needed conservation measures.

This study explores the effect of changing ecological conditions on female social organization among free-ranging vervet monkeys (Cholorocebus aethiops pygerythrus) in the Klein Karoo, South Africa. Comparison was made between a previous study conducted during a period of drought in 2009, and my own study conducted when conditions were much wetter and hence, less ecologically stressful. In addition, animals in the present study also experienced conditions of low demographic stress. Compared to 2009, females displayed lower rates of competition and aggression, did not compete for access to grooming partners, and did not preferentially groom those of high rank, nor did they do so more frequently. Females did, however, preferentially associate spatially with those they groomed most; a finding in contrast to the previous study. Females did not groom those of adjacent ranks more frequently, nor was there any relationship between rank difference and spatial association. In addition, there were rank differences in vigilance were found between females, and vigilance costs overall were affected by total group size. Overall, these findings support some aspects of the socioecological model used to predict group structure in primates, but other aspects of social organization remain puzzling, and may reflect larger overall group sizes in the Samara population, which changes patterns of engagement between females in ways not fully captured by current models. / xi, 122 leaves ; 29 cm

Values and their role in preschool education are the main topic of this diploma thesis. The mail aim is to find the answer to the question what kind of educational values nursery teachers consider to be the most important ones from their point of view concerning the curricula. In the theoretical part of my diploma thesis I describe values from different perspectives: from philosophical, psychological, sociological and pedagogical perspective which is the most important ones. It is examined how values are connected with and grounded in the binding document "Framework educational programme for preschool education", I also focus on ethical principles of preschool teachers which should be followed and I describe the influence of values on shaping of children's behaviour. In the empirical part I introduce research information, data collections and data analysis and main results. The most important values from preschool teacher's point of view can be divided into three groups: moral values, values connected with relationships and values connected with skills. Keywords values, moral values, social relationships, social skills

Two sympatric species of dolphins (Atlantic spotted dolphins, Stenella frontalis and Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus) have been long-term residents to Little Bahama Bank. This study assessed whether there was a change in residence patterns or diurnal foraging depths of bottlenose dolphins following a large emigration event in the resident spotted dolphin community on this sandbank. Photo-identification was used to identify individual bottlenose dolphins and compare pooled years before (2010-2012) and after (2013-2015) the spotted dolphin emigration. The identified community size and overall residency of the bottlenose dolphins remained similar, although two bottlenose dolphins emigrated over deep water to the site spotted dolphins emigrated. Bottlenose dolphins diurnally fed in shallower water but remained in the same geographic foraging locations. Reasons remain unknown for this depth change, but potential changes in the productivity of primary bottlenose dolphin foraging habitats or reduction of spotted dolphins from shallower depths remain possibilities. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Demographic changes, through immigration/emigration (or death) can affect the social and community structure of a population. This study reports on the effects of demographic changes following 2 intense hurricanes on two sympatric delphinid species: Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus, and Atlantic spotted dolphins Stenella frontalis. Thirty percent of the bottlenose population was lost after the hurricanes, with an influx of roughly the same number of immigrants. The stable community split into two cohesive units. Preferences in association in relation to reproductive status and sex remained. Immigrants assimilated well into the population, especially males. There is a conflict of interest between resident males and females in accepting immigrants and often females find more resistance than males. Long-term analysis of spotted dolphins revealed a community structure defined by long-term site fidelity, natal philopatry of both sexes and three social clusters. / Female associations were influenced by reproductive status and social familiarity within clusters. Males formed long-term alliances and shorter-term coalitions. Some movement between clusters occurred. Alliance formation crystallized in adulthood. Mating strategies and sex were the primary factors shaping social structure. Thirty-six percent of the spotted dolphin population was lost after the hurricanes with no influx of immigrants. The spotted dolphin community differed little from long-term analysis, including definitive social clusters and sex preferences. Social cohesion increased within units and across age classes. Some juveniles had associations of alliance level. Loss of individuals resulted in subtle changes in social structure. Interspecies associations reveal striking differences in association patterns between species. Group sizes and re-sightings of spotted dolphins were larger than for bottlenose dolphins, particularly for aggressive encounters. / Male alliances and coalitions were prevalent for spotted dolphins, but not for bottlenose dolphins. After the hurricanes lower re-sighting and group sizes for spotted dolphin males and less aggressive behavior documented, indicates a re-structuring period of relationships between the species. This study shows that environmental variations may alter the structure of mammal societies through demographic upheaval and survival of populations may depend on their social structure and the social adaptability of the species. / by Cindy Rogers Elliser. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.