1.
Common ostrich
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The ostrich or common ostrich is either one or two species of large flightless birds native to Africa, the only living member of the genus Struthio, which is in the ratite family. In 2014, the Somali ostrich was recognized as a distinct species, the common ostrich shares the order Struthioniformes with the kiwis, emus, rheas, and cassowaries. However, phylogenetic studies have shown that it is the group to all other members of Palaeognathae. It is distinctive in its appearance, with a neck and legs, and can run at up to about 70 km/h. The common ostrich is the largest living species of bird and lays the largest eggs of any living bird, the common ostrichs diet consists mainly of plant matter, though it also eats invertebrates. It lives in groups of 5 to 50 birds. When threatened, the ostrich will either hide itself by lying flat against the ground, if cornered, it can attack with a kick of its powerful legs. Mating patterns differ by region, but territorial males fight for a harem of two to seven females. The common ostrich is farmed around the world, particularly for its feathers and its skin is used for leather products and its meat is marketed commercially, with its leanness a common marketing point. Common ostriches usually weigh from 63 to 145 kilograms, or as much as two adult humans, ostriches of the East African race averaged 115 kg in males and 100 kg in females, while the nominate subspecies was found to average 111 kg in unsexed adults. Exceptional male ostriches can weigh up to 156.8 kg, at sexual maturity, male common ostriches can be from 2.1 to 2.8 m in height, while female common ostriches range from 1.7 to 2.0 m tall. New chicks are fawn in colour, with brown spots. During the first year of life, chicks grow at about 25 cm per month, at one year of age, common ostriches weigh approximately 45 kilograms. Their lifespan is up to 40–45 years, the feathers of adult males are mostly black, with white primaries and a white tail. However, the tail of one subspecies is buff, females and young males are greyish-brown and white. The head and neck of both male and female ostriches is nearly bare, with a layer of down. The skin of the neck and thighs is pinkish gray. The eyes are shaded from sunlight from above, However, the head and bill are relatively small for the birds huge size, with the bill measuring 12 to 14.3 cm
2.
Ethology
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Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour throughout history, Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to some other disciplines such as neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Ethologists are typically interested in a process rather than in a particular animal group. Ethology is a growing field. New fields, such as neuroethology, have developed, understanding ethology or animal behaviour can be important in animal training. Considering the natural behaviours of different species or breeds enables the trainer to select the individuals best suited to perform the required task and it also enables the trainer to encourage the performance of naturally occurring behaviours and also the discontinuance of undesirable behaviours. The term ethology derives from the Greek language, ἦθος, ethos meaning character and -λογία, the term was first popularized by American myrmecologist William Morton Wheeler in 1902. An earlier, slightly different sense of the term was proposed by John Stuart Mill in his 1843 System of Logic. He recommended the development of a new science, ethology, the purpose of which would be explanation of individual and national differences in character and this use of the word was never adopted. Comparative psychology also studies animal behaviour, but, as opposed to ethology, is construed as a sub-topic of psychology rather than as one of biology. The two approaches are complementary rather than competitive, but they do result in different perspectives, in addition, for most of the twentieth century, comparative psychology developed most strongly in North America, while ethology was stronger in Europe. From a practical standpoint, early comparative psychologists concentrated on gaining extensive knowledge of the behaviour of very few species, ethologists were more interested in understanding behaviour across a wide range of species to facilitate principled comparisons across taxonomic groups. Ethologists have made more use of such cross-species comparisons than comparative psychologists have. See also, Great Chain of Being Until the 19th century, jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first biologist to describe a complex theory of evolution. The second statement is that living organism, humans included. When Charles Darwin went to the Galapagos Islands, he was aware of Lamarcks theories and was influenced by them. In one sense, the first modern ethologist was Charles Darwin, whose book The Expression of the Emotions in Man, other early ethologists, such as Charles O. Their beginning for studying the behaviour of a new species was to construct an ethogram and this provided an objective, cumulative data-base of behaviour, which subsequent researchers could check and supplement
3.
Circadian rhythm
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A circadian rhythm /sɜːrˈkeɪdiən/ is any biological process that displays an endogenous, entrainable oscillation of about 24 hours. These 24-hour rhythms are driven by a clock, and they have been widely observed in plants, animals, fungi. The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning around, the formal study of biological temporal rhythms, such as daily, tidal, weekly, seasonal, and annual rhythms, is called chronobiology. Processes with 24-hour oscillations are generally called diurnal rhythms, strictly speaking. Although circadian rhythms are endogenous, they are adjusted to the environment by external cues called zeitgebers. The earliest recorded account of a circadian process dates from the 4th century B. C. E, when Androsthenes, a ship captain serving under Alexander the Great, described diurnal leaf movements of the tamarind tree. The first recorded observation of an endogenous circadian oscillation was by the French scientist Jean-Jacques dOrtous de Mairan in 1729, in 1896, Patrick and Gilbert observed that during a prolonged period of sleep deprivation, sleepiness increases and decreases with a period of approximately 24 hours. Szymanski showed that animals are capable of maintaining 24-hour activity patterns in the absence of external cues such as light, in the early 20th century, circadian rhythms were noticed in the rhythmic feeding times of bees. Extensive experiments were done by Auguste Forel, Ingeborg Beling, ron Konopka and Seymour Benzer isolated the first clock mutant in Drosophila in the early 1970s and mapped the period gene, the first discovered genetic determinant of behavioral rhythmicity. Joseph Takahashi discovered the first mammalian circadian clock mutation using mice in 1994, however, recent studies show that deletion of clock does not lead to a behavioral phenotype, which questions its importance in rhythm generation. The term circadian was coined by Franz Halberg in the 1950s, to be called circadian, a biological rhythm must meet these three general criteria, The rhythm has an endogenous free-running period that lasts approximately 24 hours. The rhythm persists in constant conditions, with a period of about 24 hours, the period of the rhythm in constant conditions is called the free-running period and is denoted by the Greek letter τ. The rationale for this criterion is to distinguish circadian rhythms from simple responses to external cues. A rhythm cannot be said to be endogenous unless it has been tested, in diurnal animals, in general τ is slightly greater than 24 hours, whereas, in nocturnal animals, in general τ is shorter than 24 hours. The rhythm can be reset by exposure to external stimuli, a process called entrainment, the external stimulus used to entrain a rhythm is called the Zeitgeber, or time giver. In other words, they maintain circadian periodicity over a range of physiological temperatures, many organisms live at a broad range of temperatures, and differences in thermal energy will affect the kinetics of all molecular processes in their cell. In order to track of time, the organisms circadian clock must maintain roughly a 24-hour periodicity despite the changing kinetics. The Q10 Temperature Coefficient is a measure of this compensating effect, if the Q10 coefficient remains approximately 1 as temperature increases, the rhythm is considered to be temperature-compensated
4.
Crepuscular
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Crepuscular animals are those that are active primarily during twilight. It is thus to be distinguished from diurnal and nocturnal behavior where an animal is active during the hours of daylight or the hours of darkness respectively. The term is not precise, however, as some animals may also be active on a moonlit night or during an overcast day. The term matutinal is used for animals that are active before sunrise. The time of day an animal is active depends on a number of factors, predators need to link their activities to times of day at which their prey is available, and prey try to avoid the times when their principal predators are at large. The temperature at midday may be too high or at night too low, so for many varied reasons, some creatures may adjust their activities depending on local competition. The word crepuscular derives from the Latin crepusculum and its sense accordingly differs from diurnal and nocturnal behavior, which respectively peak during hours of daylight and darkness. The distinction is not absolute however, because crepuscular animals may also be active on a moonlit night or on a dull day. Some animals casually described as nocturnal are in fact crepuscular, special classes of crepuscular behaviour include matutinal and vespertine, denoting species active only in the dawn or only in the dusk, respectively. Those that are active during morning and evening twilight are said to have a bimodal activity pattern. The various patterns of activity are thought to be mainly antipredator adaptations, many predators forage most intensively at night, whereas others are active at midday and see best in full sun. Such shifting states of balance are often found in ecology, some predatory species adjust their habits in response to competition from other predators. Apart from the relevance to predation, crepuscular activity in hot regions also may be the most effective way of avoiding heat stress while capitalizing on available light. Many familiar mammal species are crepuscular, including bats, hamsters, housecats, stray dogs, rabbits, ferrets, guinea pigs. Crepuscular birds include the common nighthawk, owlet-nightjar, chimney swift, American woodcock, many moths, beetles, flies, and other insects are crepuscular and vespertine
5.
Nocturnal
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Nocturnality is an animal behavior characterized by activity during the night and sleeping during the day. The common adjective is nocturnal, versus diurnal meaning the opposite, nocturnal creatures generally have highly developed senses of hearing, smell, and specially adapted eyesight. Such traits can help such as the Helicoverpa zea moths avoid predators. Some animals, such as cats and ferrets, have eyes that can adapt to both lowlevel and bright day levels of illumination, others, such as bushbabies and bats, can function only at night. Many nocturnal creatures including tarsiers and some owls have large eyes in comparison to their size to compensate for the lower light levels at night. More specifically, they have found to have a larger cornea relative to their eye size than diurnal creatures to increase their visual sensitivity in the low-light conditions. Nocturnality helps wasps, such as Apoica flavissima, avoid hunting in intense sunlight, diurnal animals, including squirrels and songbirds, are active during the daytime. Crepuscular species, such as rabbits, skunks, cats, tigers, cathemeral species, such as fossas and lions, are active both in the day and at night. While most humans are diurnal, for personal and social/cultural reasons some people are temporarily or habitually nocturnal. The most known creatures to be nocturnal include cats, rodents, and owls, while it is difficult to say which came first, nocturnality or diurnality, there is a leading hypothesis out in the evolutionary biology community. A recent study attempts to answer the question as to why so many modern day mammals retain these nocturnal characteristics even though they are not active at night, the anomaly to this theory were anthropoids, who appeared to have the most divergence from nocturnality than all organisms examined. While most mammals didnt exhibit the characteristics expected of a nocturnal creature, reptiles. A larger cornea and pupil correlated well with whether these two classes of organisms were nocturnal or not, being active at night is a form of niche differentiation, where a species niche is partitioned not by the amount of resources but by the amount of time. Hawks and owls can hunt the same field or meadow for the same rodents without conflict because hawks are diurnal and this means they are not in competition for each others prey. Nocturnality is a form of crypsis, an adaptation to avoid or enhance predation, one of the reasons that lions prefer to hunt at night is that many of their prey species have poor night vision. Many species of rodents, such as the Large Japanese Field Mouse, are active at night because most of the dozen or so birds of prey that hunt them are diurnal. There are many species that exhibit some nocturnal behaviors. For example, many seabirds and sea turtles only gather at breeding sites or colonies at night to reduce the risk of predation to themselves and/or their offspring, another reason for nocturnality is avoiding the heat of the day
6.
Cathemerality
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As a result, many species, particularly among primates, may be classified as cathemeral. Alternative patterns of activity have been observed in specific lemurs. Seasonal cathemerality has been described for the lemur as activity that shifts from being predominantly diurnal to being predominantly nocturnal over a yearly cycle. The Common brown lemurs have been observed as seasonally shifting from diurnal activity to cathemerality, though the term cathemeral was proposed, a reviewer took exception to the introduction of what he regarded as unnecessary new jargon. The result was that the term diel was substituted for cathemeral in the published version, in 1987 Tattersall gave a formal definition of cathemeral, turning to its Ancient Greek roots. The word is a compound of two Greek terms, kata, meaning through, and hemera, meaning day, transliteration leads to cathemeral, meaning through the day, with day meaning the full 24-hour day from midnight to midnight. Tattersall credits his father, Mr. Arthur Tattersall, and Dr. Robert Ireland, two classicists, for considering this lexical problem and proposing its solution
7.
Pollinator
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A pollinator is an animal that moves pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of a flower. This helps to bring about fertilization of the ovules in the flower by the gametes from the pollen grains. Insect pollinators include bees, pollen wasps, ants, flies including bee flies and hoverflies, lepidopterans, vertebrates, mainly bats and birds, but also some non-bat mammals and some lizards pollinate certain plants. Among the pollinating birds are hummingbirds, honeyeaters and sunbirds with long beaks, cycads, which are not flowering plants, are also pollinated by insects. A pollinator is different from a pollenizer, a plant that is a source of pollen for the pollination process, plants fall into pollination syndromes that reflect the type of pollinator being attracted. These are characteristics such as, overall size, the depth and width of the corolla, the color. When these characteristics are experimentally modified, pollinator visitation may decline and it has recently been discovered that cycads, which are not flowering plants, are also pollinated by insects. The most recognized pollinators are the species of bees, which are plainly adapted to pollination. Bees typically are fuzzy and carry an electrostatic charge, Honey bees, bumblebees, and their relatives do not have a scopa, but the hind leg is modified into a structure called the corbicula. Most bees gather nectar, an energy source, and pollen, which is high protein food, to nurture their young. Euglossine bees pollinate orchids, but these are male bees collecting floral scents rather than females gathering nectar or pollen, female orchid bees act as pollinators, but of flowers other than orchids. Eusocial bees such as honey bees need an abundant and steady pollen source to multiply, Honey bees travel from flower to flower, collecting nectar, and pollen grains. The bee collects the pollen by rubbing against the anthers, the pollen collects on the hind legs, in a structure referred to as a pollen basket. As the bee flies from flower to flower, some of the grains are transferred onto the stigma of other flowers. Nectar provides the energy for bee nutrition, pollen provides the protein, when bees are rearing large quantities of brood, bees deliberately gather pollen to meet the nutritional needs of the brood. Good pollination management seeks to have bees in a state during the bloom period of the crop, thus requiring them to gather pollen. Thus, the management techniques of a beekeeper providing pollination services are different from, and to some extent in tension with, many insects other than bees accomplish pollination by visiting flowers for nectar or pollen, or commonly both. Many do so adventitiously, but the most important pollinators are specialists for at least parts of their lifecycles for at least certain functions
8.
Sunflower
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Helianthus or sunflowers L. /ˌhiːliˈænθəs/ is a genus of plants comprising about 70 species in the family Asteraceae. The genus is one of many in the Asteraceae that are known as sunflowers, except for three species in South America, all Helianthus species are native to North America. The common name, sunflower, typically refers to the annual species Helianthus annuus, or the common sunflower. This and other species, notably Jerusalem artichoke, are cultivated in regions as food crops. The largest sunflower field is located in Tuscany, Italy, the domesticated sunflower, H. annuus, is the most familiar species. Perennial sunflower species are not as popular for gardens due to their tendency to spread rapidly and become invasive. Whorled sunflowers, H. verticillatus, were listed as a species in 2014 when the U. S. Fish. The primary threats are industrial forestry and pine plantations in Alabama, Georgia and they grow to 1.8 m and are primarily found in woodlands, adjacent to creeks and moist, prairie-like areas. Sunflowers are usually annual or perennial plants that grow to a height of 300 centimetres or more. They bear one or more wide, terminal capitula, with yellow ray florets at the outside. Several ornamental cultivars of Helianthus annuus have red-colored ray florets, all of them stem from a single original mutant, during growth, sunflowers tilt during the day to face the sun, but stop once they begin blooming. This tracking of the sun in young sunflower heads is called heliotropism, by the time they are mature, sunflowers generally face east. The rough and hairy stem is branched in the part in wild plants but is usually unbranched in domesticated cultivars. The petiolate leaves are dentate and often sticky, the lower leaves are opposite, ovate or often heart-shaped. They are distinguished technically by the fact that the ray florets are sterile, some species also have additional shorter scales in the pappus, and there is one species that lacks a pappus entirely. Another technical feature that distinguishes the genus more reliably, but requires a microscope to see, is the presence of a prominent, sunflowers are especially well known for their symmetry based on Fibonacci numbers and the Golden angle. There is quite a bit of variability among the species that make up the bulk of the species in the genus. Some have most or all of the leaves in a rosette at the base of the plant
9.
Night-blooming cereus
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Night-blooming cereus is the common name referring to a large number of flowering ceroid cacti that bloom at night. The flowers are short lived, and some of species, such as Selenicereus grandiflorus, bloom only once a year. Other names for one or more cacti with this habit are princess of the night, Honolulu queen, Christ in the Manger, Dama de Noche and queen of the night. While many cacti referred to as night-blooming cereus belong to the tribe Cereeae, most of the flowers open after nightfall, and by dawn, most are in the process of wilting. Plants in the geographical area tend to bloom on the same night. Also for healthy plants there can sometimes be as many as three separate blooming events spread out over the warmest months, the plants that bear such flowers can be tall, columnar, and sometimes extremely large and tree-like, but more frequently are thin-stemmed climbers. The dried flowers of the night-blooming cereus are an ingredient used in Cantonese slow-simmered soup. Some night-blooming cereus plants produce fruits which are enough for people to consume. These include some of the members of the genus Cereus, Hylocereus fruit have the advantage of lacking exterior spines, in contrast to the fruit of cacti such as the Selenicereus fruit, being brightly colored, and having a pleasant taste. Since the late 1990s, Hylocereus fruit have been grown and sold in tropical locations like Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan. In the 18th century, Dr. Robert John Thornton commissioned the creation of lavishly illustrated portfolio of flora called Temple of Flora, plate #14 is of a Night Blowing Cereus. In Hawaii, night-blooming cereus crown the lava rocks that border Punahou School and they are so associated with the school that their Hawaiian name is panini o kapunahou. Dorothy Gilmans character Mrs. Emily Pollifax grows a night-blooming cereus for her club in The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax. The Night-Blooming Cereus is a poem as well as a volume of poetry by Robert Hayden, the Night-Blooming Cereus is a 1986 novel by Joan Hess under the name Joan Hadley. In Barbara Kingsolvers book The Bean Trees one of the main characters neighbors owns a night-blooming cereus, in Bride of the Water God by Yun Mi-kyung, a night-blooming cereus is referred to as the Loneliness of the Night and refers most specifically to Epiphyllum oxypetalum. The flowers are described as being paired, so if one flower is plucked, therefore, they are also given the nickname short-lived love. Shani Mootoos novel refers to the flower in the title, Cereus Blooms at Night, a night-blooming cereus was featured in Jerry Spinellis 2007 novel, Love, Stargirl. John Wesley, John Wesleys Journal, Mon.24 July 1780, describes the blooming and fading of the Nightly Cereus which had a 125mm dia. white centre, and 225mm dia. yellow ray petals
10.
Sphingidae
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The Sphingidae are a family of moths, commonly known as hawk moths, sphinx moths, and hornworms, it includes about 1,450 species. It is best represented in the tropics, but species are found in every region and they are moderate to large in size and are distinguished among moths for their rapid, sustained flying ability. Their narrow wings and streamlined abdomens are adaptations for rapid flight, some hawk moths, such as the hummingbird hawk-moth or the white-lined sphinx, hover in midair while they feed on nectar from flowers, so are sometimes mistaken for hummingbirds. This hovering capability is known to have evolved four times in nectar feeders, in hummingbirds, certain bats, hoverflies. Sphingids have been studied for their flying ability, especially their ability to move rapidly from side to side while hovering. This is thought to have evolved to deal with predators that lie in wait in flowers. Sphingids are some of the flying insects, some are capable of flying at over 5.3 m/s. They have wingspans from 4 to over 10 cm, most species are multivoltine, capable of producing several generations a year if weather conditions permit. Females lay translucent, greenish, flattened, smooth eggs, usually singly on the host plants, egg development time varies highly, from three to 21 days. Sphingid caterpillars are medium to large in size, with stout bodies and they have five pairs of prolegs. Usually, their bodies lack any hairs or tubercules, but most species have a horn at the posterior end, many are cryptic greens and browns, and have countershading patterns to conceal them. Others are more conspicuously coloured, typically with white spots on a black or yellow background along the length of the body, a pattern of diagonal slashes along the side is a common feature. When resting, the larva usually holds its legs off the surface and tucks its head underneath, some tropical larvae are thought to mimic snakes. Larvae are quick to regurgitate their sticky, often toxic, foregut contents on attackers such as ants, development rate depends on temperature, and to speed development, some northern and high-altitude species sunbathe. Larvae burrow into soil to pupate, where they remain for 2–3 weeks before they emerge as adults, in some Sphingidae, the pupa has a free proboscis, rather than being fused to the pupal case as is most common in the Macrolepidoptera. They have a cremaster at the tip of the abdomen, usually, they pupate off the host plant, in an underground chamber, among rocks, or in a loose cocoon. In most species, the pupa is the overwintering stage, antennae are generally not very feathery, even in the males. They lack tympanal organs, but members of the group Choerocampini have hearing organs on their heads and they have a frenulum and retinaculum to join hind wings and fore wings
11.
Mammal
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Mammals are any vertebrates within the class Mammalia, a clade of endothermic amniotes distinguished from reptiles by the possession of a neocortex, hair, three middle ear bones and mammary glands. All female mammals nurse their young with milk, secreted from the mammary glands, Mammals include the largest animals on the planet, the great whales. The basic body type is a quadruped, but some mammals are adapted for life at sea, in the air, in trees. The largest group of mammals, the placentals, have a placenta, Mammals range in size from the 30–40 mm bumblebee bat to the 30-meter blue whale. With the exception of the five species of monotreme, all modern mammals give birth to live young, most mammals, including the six most species-rich orders, belong to the placental group. The largest orders are the rodents, bats and Soricomorpha, the next three biggest orders, depending on the biological classification scheme used, are the Primates, the Cetartiodactyla, and the Carnivora. Living mammals are divided into the Yinotheria and Theriiformes There are around 5450 species of mammal, in some classifications, extant mammals are divided into two subclasses, the Prototheria, that is, the order Monotremata, and the Theria, or the infraclasses Metatheria and Eutheria. The marsupials constitute the group of the Metatheria, and include all living metatherians as well as many extinct ones. Much of the changes reflect the advances of cladistic analysis and molecular genetics, findings from molecular genetics, for example, have prompted adopting new groups, such as the Afrotheria, and abandoning traditional groups, such as the Insectivora. The mammals represent the only living Synapsida, which together with the Sauropsida form the Amniota clade, the early synapsid mammalian ancestors were sphenacodont pelycosaurs, a group that produced the non-mammalian Dimetrodon. At the end of the Carboniferous period, this group diverged from the line that led to todays reptiles. Some mammals are intelligent, with some possessing large brains, self-awareness, Mammals can communicate and vocalize in several different ways, including the production of ultrasound, scent-marking, alarm signals, singing, and echolocation. Mammals can organize themselves into fission-fusion societies, harems, and hierarchies, most mammals are polygynous, but some can be monogamous or polyandrous. They provided, and continue to provide, power for transport and agriculture, as well as commodities such as meat, dairy products, wool. Mammals are hunted or raced for sport, and are used as model organisms in science, Mammals have been depicted in art since Palaeolithic times, and appear in literature, film, mythology, and religion. Defaunation of mammals is primarily driven by anthropogenic factors, such as poaching and habitat destruction, Mammal classification has been through several iterations since Carl Linnaeus initially defined the class. No classification system is accepted, McKenna & Bell and Wilson & Reader provide useful recent compendiums. Though field work gradually made Simpsons classification outdated, it remains the closest thing to a classification of mammals
12.
Bird
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Birds, a subgroup of Reptiles, are the last living examples of Dinosaurs. Birds live worldwide and range in size from the 5 cm bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m ostrich. They rank as the class of tetrapods with the most living species, at ten thousand. Birds are the closest living relatives of crocodilians, the fossil record indicates that birds evolved from feathered ancestors within the theropod group of saurischian dinosaurs. True birds first appeared during the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago, Birds, especially those in the southern continents, survived this event and then migrated to other parts of the world while diversifying during periods of global cooling. Primitive bird-like dinosaurs that lie outside class Aves proper, in the broader group Avialae, have been found dating back to the mid-Jurassic period, around 170 million years ago. Birds have wings which are more or less developed depending on the species, the digestive and respiratory systems of birds are also uniquely adapted for flight. Some bird species of aquatic environments, particularly seabirds and some waterbirds, have evolved for swimming. Many species annually migrate great distances, Birds are social, communicating with visual signals, calls, and bird songs, and participating in such social behaviours as cooperative breeding and hunting, flocking, and mobbing of predators. The vast majority of species are socially monogamous, usually for one breeding season at a time, sometimes for years. Other species have breeding systems that are polygynous or, rarely, Birds produce offspring by laying eggs which are fertilised through sexual reproduction. They are usually laid in a nest and incubated by the parents, most birds have an extended period of parental care after hatching. Some birds, such as hens, lay eggs even when not fertilised, songbirds, parrots, and other species are popular as pets. Guano is harvested for use as a fertiliser, Birds prominently figure throughout human culture. About 120–130 species have become extinct due to human activity since the 17th century, human activity threatens about 1,200 bird species with extinction, though efforts are underway to protect them. Recreational birdwatching is an important part of the ecotourism industry, the first classification of birds was developed by Francis Willughby and John Ray in their 1676 volume Ornithologiae. Carl Linnaeus modified that work in 1758 to devise the taxonomic classification system currently in use, Birds are categorised as the biological class Aves in Linnaean taxonomy. Phylogenetic taxonomy places Aves in the dinosaur clade Theropoda, Aves and a sister group, the clade Crocodilia, contain the only living representatives of the reptile clade Archosauria
13.
Reptile
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Reptiles are tetrapod animals in the class Reptilia, comprising todays turtles, crocodilians, snakes, amphisbaenians, lizards, tuatara, and their extinct relatives. The study of these traditional reptile orders, historically combined with that of amphibians, is called herpetology. Because some reptiles are more related to birds than they are to other reptiles. For this reason, many scientists prefer to consider the birds part of Reptilia as well. Some early examples include the lizard-like Hylonomus and Casineria, in addition to the living reptiles, there are many diverse groups that are now extinct, in some cases due to mass extinction events. In particular, the K–Pg extinction wiped out the pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, ornithischians, and sauropods, as well as species of theropods, crocodyliforms. Modern non-avian reptiles inhabit every continent with the exception of Antarctica, several living subgroups are recognized, Testudines, approximately 400 species, Sphenodontia,1 species, Squamata, over 9,600 species, Crocodilia,25 species, and Aves,10,000 species. Reptiles are tetrapod vertebrates, creatures that either have four limbs or, unlike amphibians, reptiles do not have an aquatic larval stage. As amniotes, reptile eggs are surrounded by membranes for protection and transport, many of the viviparous species feed their fetuses through various forms of placenta analogous to those of mammals, with some providing initial care for their hatchlings. In the 18th century, the reptiles were, from the outset of classification, the terms reptile and amphibian were largely interchangeable, reptile being preferred by the French. Josephus Nicolaus Laurenti was the first to use the term Reptilia for an expanded selection of reptiles. Today, the two groups are commonly treated under the same heading as herptiles. He subsequently proposed the names of Sauropsida and Ichthyopsida for the two groups. In 1866, Haeckel demonstrated that vertebrates could be divided based on their strategies, and that reptiles, birds. The terms Sauropsida and Theropsida were used again in 1916 by E. S, Goodrich to distinguish between lizards, birds, and their relatives on the one hand and mammals and their extinct relatives on the other. Goodrich supported this division by the nature of the hearts and blood vessels in each group, according to Goodrich, both lineages evolved from an earlier stem group, Protosauria in which he included some animals today considered reptile-like amphibians, as well as early reptiles. Watson observed that the first two groups diverged very early in history, so he divided Goodrichs Protosauria between them. He also reinterpreted Sauropsida and Theropsida to exclude birds and mammals, thus his Sauropsida included Procolophonia, Eosuchia, Millerosauria, Chelonia, Squamata, Rhynchocephalia, Crocodilia, thecodonts, non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and sauropterygians
14.
Trichromacy
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Trichromacy or trichromaticism is the possessing of three independent channels for conveying color information, derived from the three different types of cone cells in the eye. Organisms with trichromacy are called trichromats, the normal explanation of trichromacy is that the organisms retina contains three types of color receptors with different absorption spectra. In actuality the number of such receptor types may be greater than three, since different types may be active at different light intensities, in vertebrates with three types of cone cells, at low light intensities the rod cells may contribute to color vision. Humans and some mammals have evolved trichromacy based partly on pigments inherited from early vertebrates. In fish and birds, for example, four pigments are used for vision and these extra cone receptor visual pigments detect energy of other wavelengths, including sometimes ultraviolet. Eventually two of these pigments were lost and another was gained, resulting in trichromacy among some primates, humans and closely related primates are usually trichromats, as are some of the females of most species of New World monkeys, and both male and female howler monkeys. Recent research suggests that trichromacy may also be quite general among marsupials, the possibility of trichromacy in marsupials potentially has another evolutionary basis than that of primates. Further biological and behavioural tests may verify if trichromacy is a characteristic of marsupials. Most other mammals are thought to be dichromats, with only two types of cone. Most studies of carnivores, as of mammals, reveal dichromacy, examples including the domestic dog, the ferret. Some species of insects are also trichromats, being sensitive to ultraviolet, blue and green instead of blue, green, research indicates that trichromacy allows animals to distinguish red fruit and young leaves from other vegetation that is not beneficial to their survival. Another theory is that detecting skin flushing and thereby mood may have influenced the development of primate trichromate vision, the color red also has other effects on primate and human behavior as discussed in the color psychology article. Primates are the only known placental mammalian trichromats and their eyes include three different kinds of cones, each containing a different photopigment. Their peak sensitivities lie in the blue, green and yellow-green regions of the color spectrum, S cones make up 5–10% of the cones and form a regular mosaic. Special bipolar and ganglion cells pass those signals from S cones, but Mollon and Bowmaker did find that L cones and M cones are randomly distributed and are in equal numbers. Trichromatic color vision is the ability of humans and some animals to see different colors. The trichromatic color theory began in the 18th century, when Thomas Young proposed that vision was a result of three different photoreceptor cells. Hermann von Helmholtz later expanded on Youngs ideas using color-matching experiments which showed that people with normal vision needed three wavelengths to create the normal range of colors, physiological evidence for trichromatic theory was later given by Gunnar Svaetichin
15.
Simian
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The simians are the monkeys, cladistically including the apes, the New World monkeys or platyrrhines, and the catarrhine clade consisting of the Old World monkeys and apes. The simian line and the line diverged about 60 million years ago. Forty million years ago, simians from Africa colonized South America, the remaining simians split 25 million years ago into apes and Old World monkeys. Under modern classification, the tarsiers and simians are grouped under the suborder Haplorhini while the strepsirrhines are placed in suborder Strepsirrhini, in anthropoidea, evidences indicate that the Old and the New World primates went through parallel evolution. Primatology, paleoanthropology, and other related fields are split on their usage of the synonymous infraorder names, Simiiformes and Anthropoidea. According to Robert Hoffstetter, the term Simiiformes has priority over Anthropoidea because of the taxonomic term Simii by van der Hoeven, from which it is constructed, dates to 1833. In contrast, Anthropoidea by Mivart dates to 1864, while Simiiformes by Haeckel dates to 1866, Hoffstetter also argued that Simiiformes is also constructed like a proper infraorder name, whereas Anthropoidea ends in -oidea, which is reserved for superfamilies. He also noted that Anthropoidea is too easily confused with anthropoïdes, the simians are split into three distinct groups. The New World monkeys in parvorder Platyrrhini split from the rest of the line about 40 mya. This group split about 25 mya between the Old World monkeys and the apes
16.
Phenology
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Phenology is the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors. In the scientific literature on ecology, the term is used generally to indicate the time frame for any seasonal biological phenomena. For example, viticultural records of grape harvests in Europe have been used to reconstruct a record of growing season temperatures going back more than 500 years. In addition to providing a longer baseline than instrumental measurements. Observations of phenological events have provided indications of the progress of the calendar since ancient agricultural times. If ash before oak, youre in for a soak, theoretically, though, these are not mutually exclusive, as one forecasts immediate conditions and one forecasts future conditions. This program, originally started by Wells W. Cooke, involved over 3,000 observers including many notable naturalists of the time, the program ran for 90 years and came to a close in 1970 when other programs starting up at PWRC took precedence. The data, reported in Whites Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne are reported as the earliest and latest dates for each event over 25 years, so annual changes cannot therefore be determined. In Japan and China the time of blossoming of cherry and peach trees is associated with ancient festivals, such historical records may, in principle, be capable of providing estimates of climate at dates before instrumental records became available.75. Robert Marsham is the father of modern phenological recording. Marsham was a landowner who kept systematic records of Indications of spring on his estate at Stratton Strawless, Norfolk. These were in the form of dates of the first occurrence of such as flowering, bud burst. The data show significant variation in dates which correspond with warm. Between 1850 and 1950 a long-term trend of gradual climate warming is observable, after 1960 the rate of warming accelerated, and this is mirrored by increasing earliness of oak leafing, recorded in the data collected by Jean Combes in Surrey. Over the past 250 years, the first leafing date of oak appears to have advanced by about 8 days, up to 600 observers submitted returns in some years, with numbers averaging a few hundred. During this period 11 main plant phenophases were recorded over the 58 years from 1891–1948. The returns were summarised each year in the Quarterly Journal of the RMS as The Phenological Reports, in all 25 species, the timings of all phenological events are significantly related to temperature, indicating that phenological events are likely to get earlier as climate warms. The Phenological Reports ended suddenly in 1948 after 58 years, and Britain was without a recording scheme for almost 50 years
17.
Adansonia digitata
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Adansonia digitata is the most widespread of the Adansonia species, and is native to the African continent. The long-lived pachycauls are typically found in dry, hot savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa, where they dominate the landscape, and reveal the presence of a watercourse from afar. Their growth rate is determined by water or rainfall, and their maximum age. They have traditionally been valued as sources of food, water, health remedies or places of shelter and are steeped in legend, explorers of old were inclined to carve their names on baobabs, and many are defaced by modern graffiti. Common names for the baobab include dead-rat tree, monkey-bread tree, upside-down tree, the vernacular name baobab is derived from Arabic بو حِباب, which means father of many seeds. The scientific name Adansonia refers to the French explorer and botanist, Michel Adanson, when Théodore Monod searched the island in the 20th century, the tree was not to be found however. Adanson concluded that the baobab, of all the trees he studied, “is probably the most useful tree in all. ”He consumed baobab juice twice a day and he remained convinced that it maintained his health for him. Digitata refers to the digits of the hand, the baobabs compound leaves with normally five leaflets are akin to a hand. The trees usually grow as solitary individuals, and are large, some large individuals live to well over a thousand years of age. All baobab trees are deciduous, losing their leaves in the dry season and they can grow to between 5–25 m in height. They are in fact known both for their height and trunks girth, the trunk tends to be bottle-shaped and can reach a diameter of 10–14 m. The span of the roots actually exceed the height, a factor that enables it to survive in a dry climate. Many consider the tree to be due to the trunk likeness to a taproot. The trunk is smooth and shiny and can range from being reddish brown to grey, the branches are thick and wide and very stout compared to the trunk. During the early summer the tree bears very large, heavy and these are 12 cm across and open during the late afternoon to stay open for one night. The pendulous, showy flowers have a large number of stamens. They have a sweet scent but later emit a smell, especially when they turn brown. Researchers have shown that they appear to be pollinated by fruit bats of the subfamily Pteropodinae
18.
Crypsis
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In ecology, crypsis is the ability of an animal to avoid observation or detection by other animals. It may be a strategy or an antipredator adaptation. Methods include camouflage, nocturnality, subterranean lifestyle, and mimicry, crypsis can involve visual, olfactory, or auditory concealment. When it is visual, the cryptic coloration, effectively a synonym for animal camouflage, is sometimes used. Cryptic animals include the tawny frogmouth, the tuatara, some jellyfish, the sea dragon. Methods of crypsis include camouflage, nocturnality, and subterranean lifestyle, camouflage involves a variety of methods, from disruptive coloration to transparency and some forms of mimicry. As a strategy, crypsis is used by predators against prey, crypsis also applies to eggs and pheromone production. Crypsis can in principle involve visual, olfactory, or auditory camouflage, such animals may resemble rocks, sand, twigs, leaves, and even bird droppings. Countershading, the use of different colors on upper and lower surfaces in graduating tones from a belly to a darker back, is common in the sea. Where the background is brighter than is possible even with white pigment, counter-illumination in marine animals, such as squid, some animals actively camouflage themselves with local materials. The decorator crabs attach plants, animals, small stones, or shell fragments to their carapaces to provide camouflage that matches the local environment, some species preferentially select stinging animals such as sea anemones or noxious plants, benefiting from aposematism as well as or instead of crypsis. Some animals, in terrestrial and aquatic environments, appear to camouflage their odor, which might otherwise attract predators. Numerous arthropods, both insects and spiders, mimic ants, whether to avoid predation, to hunt ants, pirate perch may exhibit chemical crypsis, making them undetectable to frogs and insects colonizing ponds. In the latter type of moth, detailed analyses failed to support a phantom echo mechanism underlying sonar jamming, different aspects of crypsis and sensory abilities may be more or less pronounced in given predator-prey species pairs. Zoologists need special methods to study cryptic animals, including techniques such as radio tracking, mark and recapture. Cryptic animals tend to be overlooked in studies of biodiversity and ecological risk assessment, caterpillar that resembles bird droppings on leaves
19.
Nocturnality
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Nocturnality is an animal behavior characterized by activity during the night and sleeping during the day. The common adjective is nocturnal, versus diurnal meaning the opposite, nocturnal creatures generally have highly developed senses of hearing, smell, and specially adapted eyesight. Such traits can help such as the Helicoverpa zea moths avoid predators. Some animals, such as cats and ferrets, have eyes that can adapt to both lowlevel and bright day levels of illumination, others, such as bushbabies and bats, can function only at night. Many nocturnal creatures including tarsiers and some owls have large eyes in comparison to their size to compensate for the lower light levels at night. More specifically, they have found to have a larger cornea relative to their eye size than diurnal creatures to increase their visual sensitivity in the low-light conditions. Nocturnality helps wasps, such as Apoica flavissima, avoid hunting in intense sunlight, diurnal animals, including squirrels and songbirds, are active during the daytime. Crepuscular species, such as rabbits, skunks, cats, tigers, cathemeral species, such as fossas and lions, are active both in the day and at night. While most humans are diurnal, for personal and social/cultural reasons some people are temporarily or habitually nocturnal. The most known creatures to be nocturnal include cats, rodents, and owls, while it is difficult to say which came first, nocturnality or diurnality, there is a leading hypothesis out in the evolutionary biology community. A recent study attempts to answer the question as to why so many modern day mammals retain these nocturnal characteristics even though they are not active at night, the anomaly to this theory were anthropoids, who appeared to have the most divergence from nocturnality than all organisms examined. While most mammals didnt exhibit the characteristics expected of a nocturnal creature, reptiles. A larger cornea and pupil correlated well with whether these two classes of organisms were nocturnal or not, being active at night is a form of niche differentiation, where a species niche is partitioned not by the amount of resources but by the amount of time. Hawks and owls can hunt the same field or meadow for the same rodents without conflict because hawks are diurnal and this means they are not in competition for each others prey. Nocturnality is a form of crypsis, an adaptation to avoid or enhance predation, one of the reasons that lions prefer to hunt at night is that many of their prey species have poor night vision. Many species of rodents, such as the Large Japanese Field Mouse, are active at night because most of the dozen or so birds of prey that hunt them are diurnal. There are many species that exhibit some nocturnal behaviors. For example, many seabirds and sea turtles only gather at breeding sites or colonies at night to reduce the risk of predation to themselves and/or their offspring, another reason for nocturnality is avoiding the heat of the day
20.
International Standard Serial Number
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An International Standard Serial Number is an eight-digit serial number used to uniquely identify a serial publication. The ISSN is especially helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title, ISSN are used in ordering, cataloging, interlibrary loans, and other practices in connection with serial literature. The ISSN system was first drafted as an International Organization for Standardization international standard in 1971, ISO subcommittee TC 46/SC9 is responsible for maintaining the standard. When a serial with the content is published in more than one media type. For example, many serials are published both in print and electronic media, the ISSN system refers to these types as print ISSN and electronic ISSN, respectively. The format of the ISSN is an eight digit code, divided by a hyphen into two four-digit numbers, as an integer number, it can be represented by the first seven digits. The last code digit, which may be 0-9 or an X, is a check digit. Formally, the form of the ISSN code can be expressed as follows, NNNN-NNNC where N is in the set, a digit character. The ISSN of the journal Hearing Research, for example, is 0378-5955, where the final 5 is the check digit, for calculations, an upper case X in the check digit position indicates a check digit of 10. To confirm the check digit, calculate the sum of all eight digits of the ISSN multiplied by its position in the number, the modulus 11 of the sum must be 0. There is an online ISSN checker that can validate an ISSN, ISSN codes are assigned by a network of ISSN National Centres, usually located at national libraries and coordinated by the ISSN International Centre based in Paris. The International Centre is an organization created in 1974 through an agreement between UNESCO and the French government. The International Centre maintains a database of all ISSNs assigned worldwide, at the end of 2016, the ISSN Register contained records for 1,943,572 items. ISSN and ISBN codes are similar in concept, where ISBNs are assigned to individual books, an ISBN might be assigned for particular issues of a serial, in addition to the ISSN code for the serial as a whole. An ISSN, unlike the ISBN code, is an identifier associated with a serial title. For this reason a new ISSN is assigned to a serial each time it undergoes a major title change, separate ISSNs are needed for serials in different media. Thus, the print and electronic versions of a serial need separate ISSNs. Also, a CD-ROM version and a web version of a serial require different ISSNs since two different media are involved, however, the same ISSN can be used for different file formats of the same online serial
21.
PubMed Identifier
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PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval, from 1971 to 1997, MEDLINE online access to the MEDLARS Online computerized database primarily had been through institutional facilities, such as university libraries. PubMed, first released in January 1996, ushered in the era of private, free, home-, the PubMed system was offered free to the public in June 1997, when MEDLINE searches via the Web were demonstrated, in a ceremony, by Vice President Al Gore. Information about the journals indexed in MEDLINE, and available through PubMed, is found in the NLM Catalog. As of 5 January 2017, PubMed has more than 26.8 million records going back to 1966, selectively to the year 1865, and very selectively to 1809, about 500,000 new records are added each year. As of the date,13.1 million of PubMeds records are listed with their abstracts. In 2016, NLM changed the system so that publishers will be able to directly correct typos. Simple searches on PubMed can be carried out by entering key aspects of a subject into PubMeds search window, when a journal article is indexed, numerous article parameters are extracted and stored as structured information. Such parameters are, Article Type, Secondary identifiers, Language, publication type parameter enables many special features. As these clinical girish can generate small sets of robust studies with considerable precision, since July 2005, the MEDLINE article indexing process extracts important identifiers from the article abstract and puts those in a field called Secondary Identifier. The secondary identifier field is to store numbers to various databases of molecular sequence data, gene expression or chemical compounds. For clinical trials, PubMed extracts trial IDs for the two largest trial registries, ClinicalTrials. gov and the International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number Register, a reference which is judged particularly relevant can be marked and related articles can be identified. If relevant, several studies can be selected and related articles to all of them can be generated using the Find related data option, the related articles are then listed in order of relatedness. To create these lists of related articles, PubMed compares words from the title and abstract of each citation, as well as the MeSH headings assigned, using a powerful word-weighted algorithm. The related articles function has been judged to be so precise that some researchers suggest it can be used instead of a full search, a strong feature of PubMed is its ability to automatically link to MeSH terms and subheadings. Examples would be, bad breath links to halitosis, heart attack to myocardial infarction, where appropriate, these MeSH terms are automatically expanded, that is, include more specific terms. Terms like nursing are automatically linked to Nursing or Nursing and this important feature makes PubMed searches automatically more sensitive and avoids false-negative hits by compensating for the diversity of medical terminology. The My NCBI area can be accessed from any computer with web-access, an earlier version of My NCBI was called PubMed Cubby
22.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
23.
Chronobiology
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Chronobiology is a field of biology that examines periodic phenomena in living organisms and their adaptation to solar- and lunar-related rhythms. These cycles are known as biological rhythms, chronobiology comes from the ancient Greek χρόνος, and biology, which pertains to the study, or science, of life. Chronobiological studies include but are not limited to comparative anatomy, physiology, genetics, molecular biology, other aspects include development, reproduction, ecology and evolution. The variations of the timing and duration of activity in living organisms occur for many essential biological processes. These occur in animals, in plants, and in organisms such as fungi. They have even found in bacteria, especially among the cyanobacteria. The most important rhythm in chronobiology is the rhythm, a roughly 24-hour cycle shown by physiological processes in all these organisms. The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning around and dies, day and it is regulated by circadian clocks. In some cases, multi-trophic systems may exhibit rhythms driven by the clock of one of the members. The endogenous plant cycles may regulate the activity of the bacterium by controlling availability of plant-produced photosynthate, ultradian rhythms, which are cycles shorter than 24 hours, such as the 90-minute REM cycle, the 4-hour nasal cycle, or the 3-hour cycle of growth hormone production. Tidal rhythms, commonly observed in life, which follow the roughly 12. 4-hour transition from high to low tide. Lunar rhythms, which follow the lunar month and they are relevant e. g. for marine life, as the level of the tides is modulated across the lunar cycle. Gene oscillations – some genes are expressed more during certain hours of the day than during other hours, within each cycle, the time period during which the process is more active is called the acrophase. When the process is active, the cycle is in its bathyphase or trough phase. The particular moment of highest activity is the peak or maximum, how high the process gets is measured by the amplitude. A circadian cycle was first observed in the 18th century in the movement of plant leaves by the French scientist Jean-Jacques dOrtous de Mairan, in 1751 Swedish botanist and naturalist Carl Linnaeus designed a flower clock using certain species of flowering plants. By arranging the selected species in a pattern, he designed a clock that indicated the time of day by the flowers that were open at each given hour. For example, among members of the family, he used the hawks beard plant which opened its flowers at 6,30 am
24.
Lunar effect
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In some cases the purported effect may depend on external cues, such as amount of moonlight due to the moons phases. In other cases, for example the cycle of menstruation in humans but not other mammals. Some purported effects cannot simply be explained by variation in light levels, a considerable number of studies have examined the effect on humans. By the late 1980s, there were at least 40 published studies on the purported lunar-lunacy connection, several extensive literature reviews and meta-analyses found no correlation between the lunar cycle and human biology or behavior. But a subsequent analysis with better experimental controls, looking at considerably larger samples, the moon does influence the behavior of many animals and plants, as described below. Examples of the belief have been found in ancient Assyrian/Babylonian writing, however, no connection between lunar rhythms and menstrual onset has been conclusively shown to exist, and the similarity in length between the two cycles is most likely coincidental. Three studies carried out between 1959 and 1973 reported a 1 percent increase in births in New York following a full Moon, however, multiple studies have found no connection between birth rate and lunar phases. A1957 analysis of 9,551 births in Danville, PA, records of 11,961 live births and 8,142 natural births over a 4-year period at the UCLA hospital did not correlate in any way with the cycle of lunar phases. Analysis of 3,706 spontaneous births in 1994 showed no correlation with lunar phase, the distribution of 167,956 spontaneous vaginal deliveries, at 37 to 40 weeks gestation, in Phoenix, AZ, between 1995 and 2000, showed no relationship with lunar phase. Analysis of 564,039 births in North Carolina showed no influence of the lunar cycle on deliveries or complications. Analysis of 6,725 deliveries in Hannover revealed no significant correlation of birth rate to lunar phases, a 2001 analysis of 70,000,000 birth records from the National Center for Health Statistics revealed no correlation between birth rate and lunar phase. A review of 6 additional studies from 5 different countries similarly showed no evidence of relationship between rate and lunar phase. It is sometimes claimed that used to refuse to operate on the full Moon because of the increased risk of death of the patient through blood loss. The Spanish team acknowledged that the variation in the number of admissions throughout the lunar cycle limited the interpretation of the results. A spokesman for the Royal College of Surgeons said they would laugh their heads off at the suggestion they could not operate at the full Moon, an analysis of mental-health data found a significant effect of Moon phases, but only on schizophrenic patients. Such effects are not necessarily related directly to the appearance of the Moon, senior police officers in Brighton, UK announced in June 2007 that they were planning to deploy more officers over the summer to counter trouble they believe is linked to the lunar cycle. This followed research by the Sussex Police force that concluded there was a rise in violent crime when the Moon was full, a spokeswoman for the police force said research carried out by us has shown a correlation between violent incidents and full moons. Police in Ohio and Kentucky have blamed temporary rises in crime on the full Moon, in January 2008, New Zealands Justice Minister Annette King suggested that a spate of stabbings in the country could have been caused by the lunar cycle
25.
Season
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A season is a division of the year marked by changes in weather, ecology and hours of daylight. Seasons result from the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. During May, June, and July, the northern hemisphere is exposed to direct sunlight because the hemisphere faces the sun. The same is true of the hemisphere in November, December. It is the tilt of the Earth that causes the Sun to be higher in the sky during the months which increases the solar flux. However, due to lag, June, July, and August are the hottest months in the northern hemisphere and December, January. In temperate and subpolar regions, four calendar-based seasons are recognized, spring, summer, autumn or fall. Ecologists often use a model for temperate climate regions, prevernal, vernal, estival, serotinal, autumnal. Many tropical regions have two seasons, the rainy, wet, or monsoon season and the dry season, some have a third cool, mild, or harmattan season. Seasons often held special significance for agrarian societies, whose lives revolved around planting and harvest times, in some parts of the world, some other seasons capture the timing of important ecological events such as hurricane season, tornado season, and wildfire season. The most historically important of these are the three seasons—flood, growth, and low water—which were previously defined by the annual flooding of the Nile in Egypt. The seasons result from the Earths axis of rotation being tilted with respect to its orbital plane by an angle of approximately 23.5 degrees, regardless of the time of year, the northern and southern hemispheres always experience opposite seasons. This is because during summer or winter, one part of the planet is directly exposed to the rays of the Sun than the other. For approximately half of the year, the northern hemisphere tips toward the Sun, for the other half of the year, the same happens, but in the southern hemisphere instead of the northern, with the maximum around December 21. The two instants when the Sun is directly overhead at the Equator are the equinoxes. Also at that moment, both the North Pole and the South Pole of the Earth are just on the terminator, and hence day and night are equally divided between the northern and southern hemispheres. Around the March equinox, the northern hemisphere will be experiencing spring as the hours of daylight increase, the effect of axial tilt is observable as the change in day length and altitude of the Sun at noon during a year. Between this effect and the daylight hours, the axial tilt of the Earth accounts for most of the seasonal variation in climate in both hemispheres
26.
Cathemeral
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As a result, many species, particularly among primates, may be classified as cathemeral. Alternative patterns of activity have been observed in specific lemurs. Seasonal cathemerality has been described for the lemur as activity that shifts from being predominantly diurnal to being predominantly nocturnal over a yearly cycle. The Common brown lemurs have been observed as seasonally shifting from diurnal activity to cathemerality, though the term cathemeral was proposed, a reviewer took exception to the introduction of what he regarded as unnecessary new jargon. The result was that the term diel was substituted for cathemeral in the published version, in 1987 Tattersall gave a formal definition of cathemeral, turning to its Ancient Greek roots. The word is a compound of two Greek terms, kata, meaning through, and hemera, meaning day, transliteration leads to cathemeral, meaning through the day, with day meaning the full 24-hour day from midnight to midnight. Tattersall credits his father, Mr. Arthur Tattersall, and Dr. Robert Ireland, two classicists, for considering this lexical problem and proposing its solution
27.
Vespertine (biology)
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Vespertine is a term used in the life sciences to indicate something of, relating to, or occurring in the evening. In botany, a flower is one that opens or blooms in the evening. In zoology, the term is used for a creature that becomes active at dusk, such as bats, strictly speaking, however, the term also implies that the activity ceases during the hours of full darkness and does not resume till the next evening. Activity that continues throughout the night should be described as nocturnal, vespertine behaviour is a special case of crepuscular behaviour, like crepuscular activity, vespertine activity is limited to dusk rather than full darkness. Unlike vespertine activity, however, crepuscular activity may resume in dim twilight before dawn, a related term is matutinal, referring to activity limited to the dawn twilight. The word vespertine is derived from the Latin vesper
28.
Photoperiodism
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Photoperiodism is the physiological reaction of organisms to the length of day or night. It occurs in plants and animals, Photoperiodism can also be defined as the developmental responses of plants to the relative lengths of light and dark periods. Many flowering plants use a protein, such as phytochrome or cryptochrome, to sense seasonal changes in night length, or photoperiod. Phytochromes are signaling proteins that promote photomorphogenesis in response to red light, there are two forms of phytochromes, red light absorbing, Pr, and far-red light absorbing, Pfr. Pfr, which is the form of phytochromes, can be reverted to Pr. There are five genes that encode phytochromes in the Arabidopsis thaliana genetic model, PHYA is the gene that is involved in the regulation of photomorphogenesis in response to far-red light. PHYB is the gene that is involved in regulating photoreversible seed germination in response to red light, PHYC mediates the response between PHYA and PHYB. PHYD and PHYE mediate elongation of the internode and control the time in which the plant flowers, cryptochromes are blue-light photoreceptors that regulate responses to blue light. There are two different forms of crytochromes, CRY1 and CRY2, which regulate the inhibition of hypocotyl elongation in response to blue light, the combination of phytochromes and cryptochromes mediate growth and the flowering of plants in response to red light, far-red light, and blue light. Along with long-day plants and short-day plants, there are plants that fall into a dual-day length category and these plants are either long-short-day plants or short-long-day plants. LSDPs flower after a series of days followed by short days whereas SLDPs flower after a series of short days followed by long days. Each plant has a different length critical photoperiod, or critical night length, other than flowering, photoperiodism in plants includes the growth of stems or roots during certain seasons and the loss of leaves. Artificial lighting can be used to induce extra-long days, long-day plants flower when the night length falls below their critical photoperiod. These plants typically flower in the northern hemisphere during late spring or early summer as days are getting longer, in the northern hemisphere, the longest day of the year is on or about 21 June. After that date, days grow shorter until 21 December and this situation is reversed in the southern hemisphere. Natural nighttime light, such as moonlight or lightning, is not of sufficient brightness or duration to interrupt flowering, in general, short-day plants flower as days grow shorter after 21 June in the northern hemisphere, which is during summer or fall. The length of the period required to induce flowering differs among species and varieties of a species. Photoperiodism affects flowering by inducing the shoot to produce floral buds instead of leaves, some short-day facultative plants are, Marijuana Cotton Rice Jowar Green Gram Soybeans Day-neutral plants, such as cucumbers, roses, and tomatoes, do not initiate flowering based on photoperiodism
29.
Vernalization
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Vernalization is the induction of a plants flowering process by exposure to the prolonged cold of winter, or by an artificial equivalent. After vernalization, plants have acquired the ability to flower, vernalization is sometimes used to refer to herbal plants requiring a cold dormancy to produce new shoots and leaves but this usage is discouraged. Many plants grown in temperate climates require vernalization and must experience a period of low temperature to initiate or accelerate the flowering process. This ensures that development and seed production occurs in spring. The needed cold is often expressed in chill hours, typical vernalization temperatures are between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius. Many monocarpic winter annuals and biennials, including some ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana and winter cereals such as wheat, scientists in the early 19th century had discussed how some plants needed cold temperatures to flower. In 1857 an American agriculturist John Hancock Klippart, Secretary of the Ohio Board of Agriculture, reported the importance, one of the most significant works was by a German plant physiologist Gustav Gassner who made a detailed discussion in his 1918 paper. Lysenko himself translated the term into vernalization, after Lysenko the term was used to explain the ability of flowering in some plants after a period of chilling due to physiological changes and external factors. The formal definition was given in 1960 by a French botanist P. Chouard, lysenkos 1928 paper on vernalization and plant physiology drew wide attention due to its practical consequences for Russian agriculture. Severe cold and lack of snow had destroyed many early winter wheat seedlings. By treating wheat seeds with moisture as well as cold, Lysenko induced them to bear a crop planted in spring. Early research on vernalization focused on plant physiology, the availability of molecular biology has made it possible to unravel its underlying mechanisms. Due to plant flowering requiring the successful co-operation of several metabolic pathways, Arabidopsis thaliana is a much-studied model for vernalization. Some ecotypes, called winter annuals, have delayed flowering without vernalization, the genes that underlie this difference in plant physiology have been intensively studied. The reproductive phase change of A. thaliana occurs by a sequence of two related events, first, the transition, then the floral transition. Bolting is a robust predictor of flower formation, and hence a good indicator for vernalization research, in winter annual Arabidopsis, vernalization of the meristem appears to confer competence to respond to floral inductive signals. A vernalized meristem retains competence for as long as 300 days in the absence of an inductive signal, at the molecular level, flowering is repressed by the protein Flowering Locus C, which binds to and represses genes that promote flowering, thus blocking flowering. Winter annual ecotypes of Arabidopsis have a copy of the gene FRIGIDA
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Behavioural ecology
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Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. If an organism has a trait which provides them with an advantage in its environment. Adaptive significance therefore refers to the qualities, any given modified trait conveys. e. Individuals are always in competition with others for limited resources, including food, territories, conflict will occur between predators and prey, between rivals for mates, between siblings, mates, and even between parents and their offspring. The value of a social behavior depends in part on the behavior of an animals neighbors. For example, the more likely a male is to back down from a threat. The more likely, however, that a rival will attack if threatened, when a population exhibits a number of interacting social behaviors such as this, it can evolve a stable pattern of behaviors known as an evolutionarily stable strategy. In other words, at equilibrium every player should play the best strategic response to each other, when the game is two player and symmetric each player should play the strategy which is the best response to itself. Therefore, the ESS is considered to be the end point subsequent to the interactions. Behavioral evolution is therefore influenced by both the environment and interactions between other individuals. An example of how changes in geography can make a strategy susceptible to alternative strategies is the parasitization of the African honey bee, the term economic defendability was first introduced by Jerram Brown in 1964. Economic defendability states that defense of a resource have costs, such as energy expenditure or risk of injury, territorial behavior arises when benefits are greater than the costs. Studies of the golden-winged sunbird have validated the concept of economic defendability, when resources are at low density, the gains from excluding others may not be sufficient to pay for the cost of territorial defense. In contrast, when availability is high, there may be so many intruders that the defender would have no time to make use of the resources made available by defense. Sometimes the economics of resource competition favors shared defense, an example is the feeding territories of the white wagtail. The white wagtails feed on insects washed up by the river onto the bank, if any intruders harvested their territory then the prey would quickly become depleted, but sometimes territory owners tolerate a second bird, known as a satellite. The two sharers would then move out of phase with one another, resulting in decreased feeding rate but also increased defense, one of the major models used to predict the distribution of competing individuals amongst resource patches is the ideal free distribution model. Within this model, resource patches can be of variable quality, an experiment by Manfred Malinski in 1979 demonstrated that feeding behavior in three-spined sticklebacks follows an ideal free distribution
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Chronotype
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Chronotype refers to the behavioral manifestation of underlying circadian rhythms of myriad physical processes. A persons chronotype is the propensity for the individual to sleep at a time during a 24-hour period. Eveningness and morningness are the two extremes with most individuals having some flexibility in the timing of their sleep period, the causes and regulation of chronotypes, including developmental change, individual propensity for a specific chronotype, and flexible versus fixed chronotypes have yet to be determined. However, research is beginning to shed light on these questions, there are candidate genes that exist in most cells in the body and brain, referred to as the circadian system that regulate physiological phenomena. With the exception of the most extreme and rigid chronotypes regulation is due to gene-environment interactions. Important environmental cues include light, feeding, social behavior, and work, humans are normally diurnal creatures, that is to say they are active in the daytime. As with most other animals, human activity-rest patterns are endogenously controlled by biological clocks with a circadian period. Normal variation in chronotype encompasses sleep–wake cycles that are from two hours earlier to about two hours later than average. Extremes outside of this range can cause a difficulty in participating in normal work, school. If a persons lark or owl tendencies are strong and intractable to the point of disallowing normal participation in society, the 20th century saw greatly increased interest in and research on all questions about sleep. Tremendous strides have been made in molecular, neural and medical aspects of biological rhythmicity, kleitman, with his students including William C. Dement and Eugene Aserinsky, continued his research throughout the 1900s, O. Olov Östberg modified Öquists questionnaire and in 1976, together with J. A. Horne, he published the 19-item morningness–eveningness questionnaire, MEQ, which is used and referred to in virtually all research on this topic. Researchers in many countries have worked on validating the MEQ with regard to their local cultures. A revision of the scoring of the MEQ as well as a component analysis was done by Jacques Taillard et al. in 2004, previously the MEQ had been validated only for subjects of university age. The Circadian Type Inventory, developed by Folkard, is a version of the 20-item Circadian Type Questionnaire. Smith et al. analyzed items from MEQ, Diurnal Type Scale, and CTQ and chose the best ones to develop an improved instrument, CSM consists of 9 items from the MEQ and 4 items from the Diurnal Type Scale and is regarded as an improved version of MEQ. It currently exists in 14 language versions, the most recently developed are Polish, Russian, roberts, in 1999, designed the Lark-Owl Chronotype Indicator, LOCI
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Diel vertical migration
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Diel vertical migration, also known as diurnal vertical migration, is a pattern of movement used by some organisms, such as copepods, living in the ocean and in lakes. The migration occurs when organisms move up to the zone at night. The word diel comes from the Latin dies day, and means a 24-hour period and it is the greatest migration in the world in terms of biomass. During World War II the U. S. Navy was taking sonar readings of the ocean when they discovered the deep scattering layer, the DSL was caused by large groupings of organisms that scattered the sonar to create a false or second bottom. The false bottom was shallower during the night and deeper during the day, once scientists started to do more research on what was causing the DSL, it was discovered that a large range of organisms were vertically migrating. Most types of plankton and some types of nekton have exhibited some type of vertical migration and these migrations may have substantial effects on mesopredators and apex predators by modulating the concentration and accessibility of their prey. There are two different factors that are known to play a role in migration, endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous factors originate from the organism itself, sex, age, biological rhythms, exogenous factors are environmental factors acting on the organism such as light, gravity, oxygen, temperature, predator-prey interactions, etc. Endogenous rhythm An experiment was done at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography which kept organisms in column tanks with light/dark cycles, a few days later the light was changed to a constant low light and the organisms still displayed diel vertical migration. Thus suggestions that some type of response was causing the migration. Light Organisms want to find a light intensity. Whether it is no light or an amount of light. Studies have shown that during a full moon organisms will not migrate up as far or during an eclipse they will start to migrate, temperature Sometimes thermoclines can act as a barrier that an organism will not cross. Salinity In areas such as the Arctic, melting ice causes a layer of freshwater which organisms cannot cross, predator kairomones A predator might release a chemical cue which could cause its prey to vertically migrate away. Diel This is the most common form, Organisms migrate daily, usually up to shallow waters at night and deep waters during the day. Seasonal Organisms are found at different depths depending on what season it is, ontogenetic Organisms spend different stages of their life cycle at different depths. There are many hypotheses as to why organisms would vertically migrate, predator avoidance Light-dependent predation by fish is a common pressure that causes DVM behavior in zooplankton. Indeed, in many instances it is advantageous for zooplankton to migrate to deep waters during the day to avoid predation, metabolic advantages By feeding in the warm surface waters at night and residing in the cooler deep waters during the day they can conserve energy
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Light pollution
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Light pollution, also known as photopollution, is excessive, misdirected or obtrusive artificial light. As a major side-effect of urbanization, it is blamed for compromising health, disrupting ecosystems, Light pollution is the adding-of/added light itself, in analogy to added sound, carbon dioxide, etc. Adverse consequences are multiple, some of them may not be known yet, scientific definitions thus include the following, The degradation of photic habitat by artificial light. The alteration of light levels in the outdoor environment owing to artificial light sources. The alteration of light levels in the environment due to man-made sources of light. Indoor light pollution is such alteration of light levels in the environment due to sources of light. The introduction by humans, directly or indirectly, of light into the environment. The first three of the four scientific definitions describe the state of the environment. The fourth one describes the process of polluting by light, Light pollution is a side effect of industrial civilization. Its sources include building exterior and interior lighting, advertising, commercial properties, offices, factories, streetlights, since the early 1980s, a global dark-sky movement has emerged, with concerned people campaigning to reduce the amount of light pollution. The International Dark-Sky Association is one non-profit advocacy group involved in this movement, several industry groups also recognize light pollution as an important issue. For example, the Institution of Lighting Engineers in the United Kingdom provides its members with information about light pollution, the problems it causes, and how to reduce its impact. Since not everyone is irritated by the same lighting sources, it is common for one persons light pollution to be light that is desirable for another. One example of this is found in advertising, when an advertiser wishes for particular lights to be bright and visible, other types of light pollution are more certain. For instance, light that crosses a property boundary and annoys a neighbor is generally wasted. Where objective measurement is desired, light levels can be quantified by field measurement or mathematical modeling, authorities have also taken a variety of measures for dealing with light pollution, depending on the interests, beliefs and understandings of the society involved. Measures range from doing nothing at all, to implementing strict laws, Light pollution is a broad term that refers to multiple problems, all of which are caused by inefficient, unappealing, or unnecessary use of artificial light. Specific categories of light pollution include light trespass, over-illumination, glare, light clutter, a single offending light source often falls into more than one of these categories
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Solunar theory
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The solunar theory is a hypothesis that animals and fishes move according to the location of the moon in comparison to their bodies. The theory was laid out in 1926 by John Alden Knight, in May 1926, John Aldenn Knight put together some fishing folklore and other fishing factors such as the sun and the moon, hence the name Solunar to form a theory on the patterns of animal movement. Knight compiled a list of factors which control or influence the behavior of many freshwater and saltwater fish. Each one of the 33 different factors were considered, the three factors retained were the sun, the moon and the tide. For salt water fishing, tides have long known as a factor that controls fishes behavior. As Knights research progressed, he found rather than just tides themselves. In addition to the time of moon up - moon down, from that he establishes that there were major periods and minor periods. Knight published the first Solunar table in 1936, Solunar tables are tables that fishermen and hunters use to determine the best days of the month and times of the day for catching fish and hunting game. Knowing the time of the tides, sunrise, and sunset help fishermen predict when fish are going to bite, for hunters, the tides are not a factor. Using these tables, a fisherman and a hunter can tell when the moon is directly underfoot or overhead, the strongest activity occurs when there is a full moon or a new moon, and is weakest when there is a quarter moon or a three quarter moon. This is because the gravitational force of the moon and the sun is strongest when both are directly above or directly below our heads. People now have access to better lunar data because of improved technology the US Naval Observatory exploits and also because of the availability of and these new technologies have allowed solunar theory to generate hunting and fishing times with much greater precision. Inconsistencies abound due to the nature of the astrophysics computations. Moon transits which do not occur for more than a day, or associated times being off more than a few minutes are indications of an issue for a given position. All data providers should be verified before assuming data presented is authoritative or accurate, lunisolar calendar The Old Farmers Almanac Tide table
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