Thesis (M.S.)--University of Akron, Dept. of Biology, 2007. / "December, 2007." Title from electronic thesis title page (viewed 02/23/2008) Advisor, Francisco Moore; Co-Advisor, Brian Bagatto; Committee members, Peter Niewiarowski, Joel Duff; Department Chair, Bruce Cushing; Dean of the College, Ronald Levant; Dean of the Graduate School, George R. Newkome. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Within animal societies, individuals often differ greatly in their level of investment in cooperative activities. Individuals are predicted to show high cooperative investment if high levels of relatedness lead to large indirect fitness benefits, or if differences in individual characteristics such as age, sex, rank, or body condition increase the direct fitness benefits of helping. However, individual differences often persist after these differences are controlled for; a residual variation that remains unexplained. Understanding the proximate mechanisms underlying variation in behaviour can give novel insights into the selection pressures shaping behavioural differences. This suggests that a research focus onto the proximate mechanisms underpinning cooperative behaviours is needed to further our understanding of why individuals behave differently within social groups. In this thesis, I address this shortfall in understanding by investigating hormonal variation alongside individual differences in cooperative investment in the banded mongoose (Mungos mungo). Banded mongooses are a highly social carnivore with two highly conspicuous forms of cooperative offspring care that are easily measurable and show large inter-individual variation. In chapter 3, I demonstrate a negative carry-over effect of investment in offspring care in consecutive breeding attempts. I show that this carry-over effect is mediated by variation in glucocorticoid concentrations, which may be attributable to the energetic costs of helping. Glucocorticoids predict investment in offspring care, suggesting that this mechanism may drive inter-individual variation in cooperative investment. In chapter 4, I find evidence for a testosterone mediated trade-off between offspring care and mating effort, which suggests that inter-individual differences may also be driven by variation in the costs of helping attributable to missed mating opportunities. In chapter 5, I use simulated territorial intrusions to show that there is unlikely to be a trade-off between offspring care and territory defence in banded mongoose societies. However, carers and non-carers show a differential physiological response to territorial intrusion, suggesting that there may be a more subtle behavioural trade-off that occurs post-intrusion. In chapter 6, I find evidence for consistent individual differences in both cooperative and competitive behaviours, which suggests that individual differences in adult behaviour may be determined by early-life effects. Individual differences in cooperative investment are positively correlated, suggesting that individuals are not specialised to different cooperative activities, but are consistently either helpful or selfish. Together, these results give insights into the selection pressures shaping individual differences and highlight endocrine research as a valuable tool in understanding the evolution of cooperative societies.

Thesis (M. Env. Mgt.)--Edith Cowan University, 2006. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Apr. 16, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-97).

Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) was first diagnosed in the Kruger National Park (KNP) in 1990 and research has since focused primarily on the buffalo (Syncerus caffer) as the maintenance host and lion (Panthera leo) as a clinically affected species. However, little is known about the role that small predators might play in the tuberculosis epidemiology. The aim of this pilot study was to screen banded mongoose populations in the bTB high prevalence zone of the KNP for mycobacteria in general and for Mycobacterium bovis and other Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex members in particular to detect presence of infection. Faecal swabs, tracheal swabs and tracheal lavage of 76 banded mongooses caught in cage traps within a two kilometre radius of Skukuza Rest Camp in the KNP were submitted for culture, isolation and speciation of Mycobacterium as the gold standard of bTB diagnosis. Blood was collected and serologically analysed for M. bovis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis antibodies using the ElephantTB STAT-PAK® Assay (STAT-PAK) and the EnferplexTM TB Assay (Enferplex). DPP® VetTB Assay for elephants (DPP) was used on STAT-PAK positive samples. To complement the sample set obtained from live banded mongooses 12 animals were necropsied. Lesions and pooled lymph node samples together with a standard set of organ samples were submitted for culture and histopathology analysis. Two banded mongooses had developed well demarcated, irregularly margined, greyyellow nodules of up to 5 mm diameter located in the caudal lung lobes and/ or tracheo-bronchial, retropharyngeal or superficial cervical lymph nodes. These lesions were characterised by central necrosis in the one and calcification in the other animal. Histopathologically the lesions were described as caseating necrosis associated with epithelioid macrophages and necrogranuloma with calcified centre respectively. No acid fast bacteria were identified with Ziehl-Neelsen stain. M. bovis was isolated from lung, lymph node and liver samples as well as tracheal lavages and tracheal swab from the same two banded mongooses but not from any other study animal. No other Mycobacterium of the M. tuberculosis complex was isolated. However, a variety of environmental mycobacteria, the most frequent from the Mycobacterium avium complex, M. fortuitum group, M. simiae group and M. terrae group, were cultured. M. fortuitum group was only and M. terrae group predominantly isolated from tracheal and faecal samples whereas M. simiae group and M. avium complex were the most frequent species isolated from post mortem samples, including tissue lesions and lymph nodes. Serological analysis revealed 12 banded mongooses with a positive STAT-PAK result, confirmed with DPP. Enferplex was positive for MPB83 in four and MPB70 peptide in one animal. Only two banded mongooses, the ones with the strongest positive reaction on both STAT-PAK and DPP, reacted positively on all three serological assays. These were the same two animals that had developed granulomatous lesions and that M. bovis was cultured from ante and post mortem samples. In conclusion, this study has provided the first evidence of bTB infection in banded mongooses in the KNP and demonstrated their ability to shed M. bovis. This finding has opened the discussion around possible sources of infection and its significance at the human/ wildlife interface in and around Skukuza. / Dissertation (MMedVet)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / tm2015 / Production Animal Studies / MMedVet / Unrestricted

A new parallel solver based on SPIKE-TA algorithm has been developed using OpenMP API for solving diagonally-dominant banded linear systems on shared memory architectures. The results of the numerical experiments carried out for different test cases demonstrate high-performance and scalability on current multi-core platforms and highlight the time savings that SPIKE-TA OpenMP offers in comparison to the LAPACK BLAS-threaded LU model. By exploiting algorithmic parallelism in addition to threaded implementation, we obtain greater speed-ups in contrast to the threaded versions of sequential algorithms. For non-diagonally dominant systems, we implement the SPIKE-RL scheme and a new Spike-calling-Spike (SCS) scheme using OpenMP. The timing results for solving the non-diagonally dominant systems using SPIKE-RL show extremely good scaling in comparison to LAPACK and modified banded-primitive library.

Behavior and disease interact bidirectionally and on multiple levels of host organization, and these interactions can have important consequences for population-level disease dynamics. I explored how behavior can both influence and respond to infectious disease in a banded mongoose population experiencing epidemics of tuberculosis (TB) caused by the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium mungi in the M. tuberculosis complex (Alexander et al. 2010). Banded mongooses are highly social carnivores that live in troops of 5 to 65 individuals. Mycobacterium mungi appears to be primarily environmentally transmitted, but direct horizontal transmission cannot be ruled out. Approximately 10-20% of mongooses become diseased with TB each year in the study population in and around Chobe National Park, Botswana, and all mongooses with clinical signs of TB die within months. Characteristics of both banded mongooses and clinical TB provided a productive study system for exploring interactions between behavior and disease: first, free-living mongooses can be habituated and directly observed; second, the clinical signs of TB can be visually assessed non-invasively; and third, the mongooses' high sociality and egalitarianism provide a unique and ecologically relevant host social system for examining bidirectional interactions between behavior and infectious disease. I found that banded mongooses influenced and responded to disease through their behavior at both the individual and troop level, with possible implications for banded mongoose population and disease dynamics. Due to the environmental transmission of M. mungi, which appears to invade mongooses through breaks in the skin and nasal planum (Alexander et al. 2010), I focused on aggressive interactions as a potential risk factor for acquiring TB in this system. Troops with higher levels of aggression had more injuries, and at the individual level, injuries were a strong predictor of TB, suggesting that aggression may increase risk of disease by creating potential invasion sites for the pathogen. Troops were more aggressive when they foraged in garbage than when they foraged in other habitats, presumably due to the concentration of resources at this highly modified habitat. Overall, my results on how behavior can influence disease in this system suggest that anthropogenic supplementation of food, albeit inadvertent in this system, augments aggression levels in banded mongooses and may in turn lead to a higher incidence of TB. Second, I examined how behavior responds to disease in banded mongooses. Diseased individuals showed significantly lower activity and alertness, but intriguingly, did not show a reduction in overall social behaviors. Diseased individuals were less likely to disperse than healthy individuals, and healthy individuals with diseased troopmates may have been more likely to disperse than individuals without diseased troopmates. Despite this latter possible increase in dispersal in the presence of diseased conspecifics, diseased individuals were not avoided by their troopmates in daily social interactions. For example, diseased individuals were allogroomed at a higher than expected rate even though their reciprocation during allogrooming was approximately half that of healthy individuals. These interactions between behavior and disease have implications for banded mongoose troop and population dynamics, via changes in dispersal behavior and mortality, and can also affect disease dynamics, such as transmission rate. For example, changes to dispersal may affect the amount of inbreeding and outbreeding that occurs in this normally inbred species, and disease might be amplified in areas where aggression is increased by resource augmentation from humans. Additionally, the role that garbage plays in mongoose aggression suggests that humans may be inadvertently increasing disease incidence in this system, as well as in other taxa for which anthropogenic food augmentation may alter disease dynamics via changes in intraspecific aggression. This research sheds light on ways that behavior can influence and respond to disease that are often overlooked in disease ecology. / Ph. D.

Four populations of nine-banded armadillos, Dasypus novemcinctus, were investigated in the south-central United States in order to assess genetic variation in an isolated population (Electric Island, Lake Hamilton, Garland County, Arkansas); a semi-isolated population (Arkansas Post, Arkansas County, Arkansas), and two free ranging populations (southern Arkansas and central Texas). A 233 basepair sequence of the D-loop region of mitochondrial DNA was sequenced in individuals from each population. Individuals and populations were compared to assess relatedness among populations and individuals. Higher sequence diversity was detected in the semi-isolated population, while lower sequence diversity was observed in the isolated and free ranging populations. Overall, all populations exhibited low genetic variation when compared to genetic variation for other mammals. The results support the hypothesis that rapid range expansion combined with the organism's unique reproductive strategies have promulgated low genetic variation in the North American populations of nine-banded armadillos.

A two-year field study and two incubation studies were conducted to evaluate incorporating urea with a urease and nitrification inhibitor to reduce N2O and N losses from fall banded fertilizer. In each year of the field experiment, five fertilizer treatments (fall banded NBPT-DCD urea, conventional urea, calcium nitrate, spring banded conventional urea and control) were applied at three sites. The effect of incorporating urease and nitrification inhibitors with urea was not consistent in our studies. The application of fall banded NBPT and DCD did not result in greater agronomic performance. Moreover, the addition of inhibitors to urea did not reduce nitrous oxide emissions in the field. The addition of inhibitors resulted in significantly less cumulative nitrous oxide emissions compared to conventional urea in only one of two laboratory experiments. In conditions where fertilizer was not generally susceptible to large losses, the effects of urease and nitrification inhibitors may not be evident.

A two-year field study and two incubation studies were conducted to evaluate incorporating urea with a urease and nitrification inhibitor to reduce N2O and N losses from fall banded fertilizer. In each year of the field experiment, five fertilizer treatments (fall banded NBPT-DCD urea, conventional urea, calcium nitrate, spring banded conventional urea and control) were applied at three sites. The effect of incorporating urease and nitrification inhibitors with urea was not consistent in our studies. The application of fall banded NBPT and DCD did not result in greater agronomic performance. Moreover, the addition of inhibitors to urea did not reduce nitrous oxide emissions in the field. The addition of inhibitors resulted in significantly less cumulative nitrous oxide emissions compared to conventional urea in only one of two laboratory experiments. In conditions where fertilizer was not generally susceptible to large losses, the effects of urease and nitrification inhibitors may not be evident.