The thesis is based on the presumption that zoological gardens are cultural institutions which reflect social and cultural interpretations of what is called 'nature' and animals. By analyzing data gained through participant observation it focuses on the meanings and forms which are ascribed to animals living in the Prague Zoo via the gaze of visitors. Furthermore, by analysis of visual and textual sources provided by the zoo, I examine how the 'zoo animal' is constructed by the zoo itself. I argue that this zoo animal constitutes a specific form of the animal, different from both the domesticated and the wild one. The zoo and its visitors create a chimeric 'beast' which encompasses different and even contradictory trends and conceptions of thinking about the zoo animal.

Тема выпускной квалификационной работы – «Зоологический код в обеспечении межкультурной / межъязыковой коммуникации (на примере фразеологических единиц с компонентом зоонимом в китайском, русском и английском языках)». Цель данного исследования – выявить национально-культурные и универсальные составляющие зоологического кода на примере фразеологизмов с компонентом-зоонимом в китайском, русском и английском языках, способствующие обеспечению адекватного переводческого процесса при межкультурной коммуникации в обозначенной триаде языков. Объектом исследования данной работы являются фразеологические единицы с компонентом-зоонимом в китайском, русском и английском языках. В исследовании используется сопоставительный метод, позволяющий определить национально-культурные и универсальные образно-коннотативные особенности фразеологических единиц с компонентом-зоонимом в трёх вышеупомянутых языках. / The topic of the present graduation thesis is “Zoological code in ensuring intercultural / interlingual communication (on the example of phraseological units with zoonym in Chinese, Russian and English)”. The purpose of the investigation lies in revealing the national-cultural and universal components of the zoological code using the example of phraseological units with zoonym in Chinese, Russian and English, which contribute to ensuring an adequate translation process for intercultural communication in the three languages. The subject of the research is phraseological units with zoonym in Chinese, Russian and English. The research uses a comparative method to determine the national-cultural and universal figuratively connotative features of phraseological units with zoonym in the three above-mentioned languages. The results of the research may be used in the process of mutual translation between Chinese, English, and Russian languages; in lexicographic practice for compiling a trilingual dictionary of zoonyms; in the classes of linguoculturology and intercultural communication, as well as for the purpose of teaching Russian to foreign students.

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Ce mémoire de maîtrise se penche sur les représentations de l’espace zoologique dans la pratique de l’artiste montréalaise Karine Payette (1983-), avec un accent mis sur l’impact de celui-ci sur les vies animales de même que sur une conception anthropocentriste de la nature et du non-humain. Témoignant de l’intérêt de l’artiste pour le rapport des êtres à leur habitat, je propose une analyse de certaines des œuvres de la série Espaces sans espèces (2019) et de l’installation À perpétuité (2018), qui interrogent le fonctionnement actuel des lieux de conservation du vivant. La remise en question, par Payette, des jardins zoologiques s’arrime à une considération antispé-ciste pour les animaux non-humains. Compris comme la discrimination perpétrée à un être en rai-son de son appartenance à une espèce particulière (Giroux 2020), le spécisme engendre l’exploitation systématique des animaux, qu’elle soit faite pour nourrir, vêtir ou encore divertir les êtres humains. M’appuyant sur le concept d’esthétique antispéciste (Van Der Donckt 2016) qui vise à considérer les pratiques artistiques interrogeant le rapport de domination des êtres humains sur les animaux, mon mémoire souhaite démontrer comment Payette, par une multitude de straté-gies esthétiques, fait voir le spécisme présent au sein des zoos. Prenant en considération le zoo en tant que dispositif spatial (Estebanez 2010), mon mémoire s’attarde à la fois à la présence et à l’absence animale au sein des œuvres de Payette : dans un pre-mier temps, la présence animale fait voir les conséquences psychopathologiques de la captivité as-sociée au zoo sur les animaux, notamment par la présence de stéréotypies (Marino 2018). Dans un second temps, l’absence des animaux montre la plasticité de l’espace zoologique, où le vivant de-vient spectacle (Ramade 2019). À travers son étude des jardins zoologiques, Payette met de l’avant les différents problèmes éthiques que pose l’utilisation des animaux par les humains à des fins de divertissement. / This master's thesis examines representations of zoological space in the practice of Montreal artist Karine Payette (1983-), with a focus on its impact on animal lives as well as an anthropocentric conception of nature and the non-human. Testifying to the artist's interest in the relationship be-tween beings and their habitat, I propose an analysis of some of the works in the series Espaces sans espèces (2019) and of the installation À perpétuité (2018) that question the current functioning of living conservation sites. Payette's questioning of zoos is linked to an antispeciesist consideration of non-human animals. Understood as the discrimination perpetrated against a being because it belongs to a particular spe-cies (Giroux 2020), speciesism engenders the systematic exploitation of non-human animals, whether to feed, clothe or entertain human beings. Drawing on the concept of antispeciesist aesthet-ic (Van Der Donckt 2016), which aims to consider artistic practices that question the relationship of domination of human beings over animals, my thesis aims to demonstrate how Payette, through a multitude of aesthetic strategies, makes the speciesism present within zoos visible. Considering the zoo as dispositif (Estebanez 2010), my dissertation focuses on both animal presence and absence in Payette’s works: in the first instance, animal presence shows the psychopathological consequences of the captive state associated with the zoo on the animals, notably through the presence of stereotypies (Marino 2018). Secondly, the absence of animals shows the plasticity of the zoological space, where the living becomes spectacle (Ramade 2019). Across her study of zoos, Payette highlights the various ethical issues raised by the use of animals by humans for entertainment purposes.

The guiding principles of polytechnic education, as developed at the École Polytechnique in Paris from 1794, aimed at practical application and democratization. Accordingly, great value was attached to the practical experience of technology. At that time, it was possible to acquire these primarily through drawing exercises, demonstrations and experiments, as well as through geometric methods. In order to synthesize new technical means, it was supremely important to be able to determine from a drawing those connections that were both constructive and related to manufacturing technology. Therefore, the educational goals at the emerging polytechnic schools involved training spatial powers of imagination, conveying design thinking and encouraging precision skills. Such precision and reproducibility were required by the developing mechanized production in factories.

Two faces of ZOO Perception of zoos from the view of their supporters and opponents The main topic of this thesis is a role of zoological gardens in the modern society, especially their importance to conservation of biodiversity as well as to progress in public education. I was interested not only in the opinions and the attitudes of the supporters of zoological gardens, but also in views of their opponents as the opposite side. In the case of the opponents I wanted to reveal if their criticism of zoos is based on negative emotions (bad feeling from breeding animals in captivity and thinking about their rights to freedom) or rise from real inadequacies (for example bad living conditions of animals). So in the theoretical part of the thesis I was concerned about contributions of zoological gardens in many ways as well as about their limitations, mostly mentioned by their opponents. To be more precise in drawing conclusions I made my own empirical research which was based on questionnaires and interviews with directors of certain zoos in the Czech Republic. The main aim of my research was not only a usual opinion poll, but also a detection of differences in opinions and personal characteristics between supporters and opponents of zoos. I also wanted to find out which aspects of zoos are highly...

This thesis proposes a collection of analytical and computational methods for inferring an underlying social structure of a given population, observed only via timestamped occurrences of its members across a range of locations. It shows that such data streams have a modular and temporally-focused structure, neither fully ordered nor completely random, with individuals appearing in "gathering events". By exploiting such structure, the thesis proposes an appropriate mapping of those spatio-temporal data streams to a social network, based on the co-occurrences of agents across gathering events, while capturing the uncertainty over social ties via the use of probability distributions. Given the extracted graphs mentioned above, an approach is proposed for studying their community organisation. The method considers communities as explanatory variables for the observed interactions, producing overlapping partitions and node membership scores to groups. The aforementioned models are motivated by a large ongoing experiment at Wytham woods, Oxford, where a population of Parus major wild birds is tagged with RFID devices and a grid of feeding locations generates thousands of spatio-temporal records each year. The methods proposed are applied on such data set to demonstrate how they can be used to explore wild bird sociality, reveal its internal organisation across a variety of different scales and provide insights into important biological processes relating to mating pair formation.

This thesis describes an investigation into silk spinning, with the objective of producing high performance silk fibres in the laboratory using a novel spinning device based upon observations on natural spinning glands and processes. After an in-depth literature review the work is reported in two sections: natural and artificial spinning. The literature provides fragmented data on different aspects of natural silk production, and artificial spinning has not yet reproduced fibres with the properties of native silk fibres, despite unfounded claims of biomimetic spinning. The first half of the thesis looks at natural silk spinning. The work started with a general study of the morphology of spider and silkworm spinning ducts: First, how the silk fibre develops as the dope flows through the gland; and second the relationship between silk fibre properties and both gland morphology and spinning speed. More detailed studies using histochemical and spectroscopic investigations showed that the silk ducts of the spider Nephila edulis and the silkworm Bombyx mori both contain β-chitin, despite an evolutionarily distant common ancestor. Finally, observations showed that the duct of N. edulis consists of alternating nanoporous discs, and FEA modelling indicated that the duct is optimised for mechanical integrity and permeability. The second half of the thesis describes the development of a spinning device that uses natural silk dope mainly taken from B. mori as feedstock. It begins with a description of the gradual development of the engineering aspects of the spinning device, to meet challenges raised during the spinning investigation. The development of a centrifugal capillary rheometer, for practical quantitative insights into rheological processes is then presented. Finally the spinning investigation is reported: first, the screening of spinning in glass capillaries based upon natural gland dimensions and flow rates, which have been shown to induce fibrillation in silk dope in a rheometer, and also included initiation of instability through heat applied along the capillary; second, the final spinning evaluation, using lessons learned from all the screening trials throughout the project, but also including a key development of a hydrophobic coating on the capillary tip to inhibit droplet formation and massively increase the process stability and ease of fibre production. The main conclusions from this work are that good silk fibre cannot be spun by flow shear stress alone; and, that heat instability induces indiscriminate gelation of the silk, whose disordered molecular structure gives poor silk fibre properties. The body of work behind these conclusions provides fundamental background information and new insights that will contribute to the next stages of development of artificial silk spinning, from obtaining a better understanding of the biology of natural spinning glands to the engineering difficulties of implementing the bioinspired principles.

New Caledonian crows (NC crows; Corvus moneduloides) are the most prolific avian tool-users and crafters, using up to three unique tool types derived from numerous plant materials. Since the discovery that wild populations of NC crows use and manufacture different tools in different locations with no measured environmental correlates to these distributions, the process by which NC crows acquire their tool-oriented behavior has been investigated. Two major findings were discovered in 2005: NC crows have a genetic predisposition to manipulate stick like objects, and they increase their rate of manipulation when exposed to social influences. Since then, much of the research into the sociality of wild NC crows has focused on direct social influences, especially the parent-juvenile relationship, yet no social network of wild NC crows has been described. In my thesis, I characterized a new proximity-logging device, Encounternet, and outline a four-step plan to assess error in animal borne devices; uncovered drivers, such as relatedness, space-use, and environmental factors, of wild NC crow sociality, and experimentally manipulated the social network, revealing immediate changes to the number of day-time and roosting partners, the breakdown of first-order relatedness driving sociality, and an increase in the amount of time NC crows associate; and revealed an indirect pathway via tools left behind by conspecifics allowing for the transmission of tool-properties between unrelated NC crows. Altogether, I furthered our understanding of wild NC crow sociality through the use of an animal-borne device, experimental manipulation in the wild measuring the response of the NC crow social network, and demonstrated the utility of animal-borne devices in mapping the network of a population of wild birds.

Inbreeding occurs when relatives mate and have offspring. Inbreeding depression is hypothesized to have influenced the evolution of mating systems and behavioural mechanisms of inbreeding avoidance in the animal kingdom. Inbreeding in the wild is difficult to measure, as in order to build a pedigree allowing us to identify matings between relatives, the identity of as many as possible members of a population needs to be known. For a long time, the main source of knowledge about inbreeding depression was based on laboratory and agricultural studies, which did not reflect the array of environmental pressures wild populations have to cope with. In consequence, the deleterious consequences of inbreeding have often been underestimated. This is problematic because accurate estimates of the effect size of inbreeding depression are needed to study the strength of selection on inbreeding avoidance mechanisms, and are also of importance to conservation genetics. The aim of this thesis was to use pedigree data to infer the occurrence and effects of inbreeding using over forty years of breeding events of the great tit Parus major from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire. The effects of inbreeding on fitness were investigated across a life-history continuum, and across environments. I found that close inbreeding (f=0.25) resulted in pronounced inbreeding depression, which acted independently on hatching success, fledging success, and recruitment success, and reduced the number of fledged grand-offspring by 55%. My results therefore suggest that estimates of fitness costs of inbreeding must focus on the entire life cycle. I also show that the variation in the strength of inbreeding depression varies across environments, particularly so the more the environmental variable considered is linked to fitness. These results emphasise the need of using relevant environmental contrasts when investigating inbreeding by environment interactions. I further asked whether individuals involved in matings with relatives differed relative to individuals mating with unrelated partners. I did not find any evidence for clear predictors of inbreeding, and I show that inbreeding depression in our population is entirely independent of any tendency for low quality parental genotypes, or phenotypes, to inbreed. Neither did I find any evidence for active inbreeding avoidance: great tits did not mate less often with kin than expected based on several scenarios of random mating, nor did I find increased rates of extra-pair paternity among birds breeding with relatives. In fact, I observed quite the contrary, as birds mating with kin exhibited a higher than average rate of close inbreeding relative to all scenarios of random mating investigated, showed lower rates of extra-pair paternity and divorce than birds mated to unrelated partners. I hypothesise that cases of occasional inbreeding in this population may result from mis-imprinting or a related process whereby some birds develop particularly strong bonds that are at odds with all predictions of avoiding inbreeding. Finally, I asked to what extent natal dispersal, a behaviour that is often hypothesized to play an important role in avoiding inbreeding, indeed reduces the likelihood of inbreeding. I found that male and female individuals breeding with a relative dispersed over several-fold shorter distances than those outbreeding. This led to a 3.4 fold increase (2.3-5, 95% CI) in the likelihood of close inbreeding relative to the population average when individuals dispersed less than 200m. This thesis demonstrates that inbreeding has deleterious effects on a wild population of birds, occurring throughout an individual’s life, and is of varying strength across environments. My findings strongly support the theory that natal dispersal should be considered as a mechanism of prime importance for inbreeding avoidance.