Pastoralists

Author(s):  
Philip Carl Salzman

Pastoralists depend for their livelihood on raising livestock on natural pasture. Livestock may be selected for meat, milk, wool, traction, carriage, or riding, or a combination. Pastoralists rarely rely solely on their livestock; they may also engage in hunting, fishing, cultivation, commerce, predatory raiding, and extortion. Some pastoral peoples are nomadic and others are sedentary, while yet others are partially mobile. Economically, some pastoralists are subsistence oriented, others are market oriented, and others combining the two. Politically, some pastoralists are independent or quasi-independent tribes, others, largely under the control of states, are peasants, while yet others are citizens engaged in commercial production in a modern state. All pastoralists have to address a common set of issues: gaining and taking possession of livestock, including good breeding stock. Ownership of livestock may consist of individual, group, or distributed rights, managing the livestock through husbandry and herding. Husbandry is selecting animals for breeding and maintenance. Herding is ensuring that the livestock gains access to adequate pasture and water. Pasture access can be gained through territorial ownership and control, purchase, rent, and patronage. Security must be provided for the livestock through active human oversight or restriction by means of fences or other barriers. Manpower is provided by kin relations, exchange of labor, barter, monetary payment, or some combination of these. Prominent pastoral peoples are sheep, goat, and camel herders in the arid band running from North Africa through the Middle East and northwest India, the cattle and small stock herders of Africa south of the Sahara, reindeer herders of the sub-Arctic northern Eurasia, the camelid herders of the Andes, and the ranchers of North and South America.

Zootaxa ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 487 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
R. J. BLAKEMORE

The 'cosmopolitan' lumbricid earthworm Dendrobaena pygmaea (Savigny, 1826) is reported for the first time from Asia, from the campus of Yokohama National University, Japan. It is a small detritivorous 'litter species' or 'humus feeder' found to have a simple intestinal typhlosole. Here it is briefly re-described, and its taxonomy and previously known distribution (in Europe, North Africa, North and South America) are discussed. A figure is provided. As Yokohama port was opened for foreign trade shortly after Commodore Perry's visit in 1853, the incursion of this species is probably only within the last 150 years. It is not considered to pose any particular environmental risk.


1987 ◽  
Vol 94 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 333-335
Author(s):  
Lynn Siri Kimsey

The chrysidid tribe Elampini comprises a diverse group of genera. There are a number of small (1-3 species) highly derived genera in this group. Nearly all of these occur in 2 regions, southwestern North America and the area comprising the Middle East, southern USSR and North Africa. The small North American genera are Hedychreides Bohart, Microchridium Bohart, Minymischa Kimsey, Pseudolopyga Bodenstein and Xerochrum Bobart. Those in the latter region include: Haba Semenov, Prochridium Linsenmaier and the new genus, Adelopyga, described below. One genus, Muesebeckidium Krombein, occurs in both North and South America.The following abbreviations are used: F = flagellomere, MOD = midocellus diameter, PD = puncture diameter, Rs = forewing radial sector, and S = gastral sternum.


1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 495 ◽  
Author(s):  
JP Spradbery ◽  
GF Maywald

The social wasp Vespula germanica (F.) occurs throughout Europe south of latitude 62-degrees-N. Its native distribution extends into northern Africa, the Middle East, northern India, China and Korea. It has been accidentally introduced into several regions, including North and South America, and South Africa. It has also been introduced to Australasia, where it became established in Tasmania in 1959 and at several Australian mainland localities during 1977-78. It is now widespread throughout Victoria, in much of southern and coastal New South Wales, and in some suburbs of Adelaide and Per-th. One nest has been recorded in Maryborough, Queensland. The observed global distribution is used here to determine the potential distribution and relative abundance of V. germanica in Australia using the climate-matching computer program CLIMEX. The results indicate that this pestiferous wasp could potentially colonise most of the eastern seaboard of Australia north to Rockhampton, Queensland. V. germanica is likely to adversely affect human activities, with accompanying environmental damage as it inevitably spreads and consolidates, and prospects for containment and control appear minimal.


Author(s):  
Naomi Oreskes

The final chapter of the third edition of The Origin of Continents and Oceans was devoted to the dynamic causes of drift, and Wegener’s tone in these final fifteen pages was decidedly more tentative than in the rest. Frankly acknowledging the huge uncertainties surrounding this issue, he proceeded on the basis of a phenomenological argument. Mountains, Wegener pointed out, are not randomly distributed: they are concentrated on the western and equatorial margins of continents. The Andes and Rockies, for example, trace the western margins of North and South America; the Alps and the Himalayas follow a latitudinal trend on their equatorial sides of Europe and Asia. If mountains are the result of compression on the leading edges of drifting continents, then the overall direction of continental drift must be westward and equatorial. Continental displacements are not random, as the English word drift might imply, but coherent. This coherence had been the inspiration for an earlier version of drift proposed by the American geologist Frank Bursley Taylor (1860–1938). A geologist in the Glacial Division of the U.S. Geological Survey under T. C. Chamberlin, Taylor was primaril known for his work on the Pleistocene geology of the Great Lakes region. But his knowledge extended beyond regional studies: as a special student at Harvard, he had studied geology and astronomy; as a survey geologist under the influence of Chamberlin and G. K. Gilbert, he had published a number of articles on theoretical problems. One of these was an 1898 pamphlet outlining a theory of the origin of the moon by planetary capture; in 1903, Taylor developed his theoretical ideas more fully in a privately published book. Turning the Darwin–Fisher fissiparturition hypothesis on its head, Taylor proposed that the moon had not come from the earth but had been captured by it after the close approach of a cornet. Once caught, (lie tidal effect of the moon increased the speed of the earth’s rotation and pulled the continents away from the poles toward the equator. In 1910, Taylor pursued the geological implications of this idea in an article in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America entitled “Bearing of the Tertiary Mountain Belt on the Origin of the Earth’s Plan.”


Author(s):  
Choosak Nithikathkul ◽  
Prasert Saichua ◽  
Louis Royal ◽  
John H. Cross

Capillaria species are members of the superfamily Trichinelloidae. These worms have a filamentous thin anterior end and a slightly thicker oesophagus which is surrounded by glandular cells or stichocytes. This oesophageal pattern is called stichosomal oesophagus. Capillaria species are parasites which are found in many vertebrate animals. More than two hundred species have been reported in several vertebrate species, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals (Cross 1992; Chitwood et al. 1968), but only three species infect humans. These are Capillaria hepatica , C. aerophila and C. philippinensis (McCarthy and Moore 2000). Of these intestinal capillariosis, a fish-borne parasitic zoonosis caused by C. philippinensis , is the most important. Humans acquire the parasite, C. philippinensis, by eating uncooked or raw freshwater fish (Cross and Basaca-Sevilla 1991). The disease is endemic mainly in Philippines and Thailand where there are many reported fatalities.Although C . hepatica is found in rodents worldwide, only a few cases of hepatic capillariosis have been reported in humans from Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. The infection is acquired by the ingestion of embryonated eggs from the soil. Female worms deposit eggs in the liver tissue and granulomas develop around the egg. The eggs are released after the rodent is eaten and the liver digested. Eggs pass in the faeces and are deposited in the soil where they embryonate. Avoidance of contaminated soil would prevent human infection and destruction of rodents would control animal infections.Only 12 cases of human infection caused by Capillaria aerophila have been reported, the majority from Russia. The parasite is found within tissue of the respiratory passages of canines and felines worldwide.Anatrichosoma cutaneum (Nematoda, Trichosomoididae), also included in this chapter, is primarily a subcutaneous parasite of monkeys, but there are two reports of cutaneous infections in humans resulting in serpiginous lesions in the skin of the soles, palms, and nasal passages. In addition there is a further suspected case isolated from a breast nodule and a possible case of mucosal lesions in the mouth reported. Whole monkey colonies can be infected with this parasite and control is difficult.


Oryx ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur M. Greenhall

In both North and South America rabies is carried by bats, especially the vampire bats in the warmer central countries. Every country in the two continents, with only three exceptions, and every state in the USA, with only two exceptions, has reported rabid bats. As rabies is fatal to both humans and domestic animals control measures are essential. The author, who was for many years in charge of vampire-bat control in Trinidad, where in the ten years up to 1935, 89 humans and thousands of cattle died of paralytic rabies, emphasises that bats are beneficial animals and that control must be aimed, not at indiscriminate destruction of bats, but to regulate the population levels, and that care must be taken not to involve other species.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 238-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey Korotayev ◽  
Elena Slinko ◽  
Kira Meshcherina ◽  
Julia Zinkina

The current article investigates the relation between values and modernization applying some elements of the method proposed by Inglehart and Welzel (the authors of the Human Development Sequence Theory) to the data of Shalom Schwartz. The values survey by Schwartz specifies two main value axes, namely, conservation versus openness to change and self-transcendence versus self-enhancement. Our research has revealed that the correlation between these two value axes differs in its direction when estimated for “macro-Europe” (that includes Europe and former settlement colonies of North and South America and Oceania) and “Afroasia” (that includes Asia and Africa). In “macro-Europe,” we deal with a significant positive correlation between openness to change and self-transcendence, whereas in “Afroasia,” this correlation is strong, significant, and negative. We investigate the possible impact of modernization on this difference. To do this, we approximate modernization through such indicators as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the proportions of the labor force employed in various sectors of economy. We find that, in both megazones, modernization is accompanied by increasing openness to change values. As for the self-transcendence/self-enhancement axis, we propose two possible explanations of the different dynamics observed in Europe and in “the East” (Asia and North Africa), namely, (a) that Eastern and Western societies find themselves at different modernization stages and (b) that this difference is accounted for by different civilizational patterns. Further analysis suggests that the latter explanation might be more plausible.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Wiley

Gerald Handerson Thayer (1883–1939) was an artist, writer and naturalist who worked in North and South America, Europe and the West Indies. In the Lesser Antilles, Thayer made substantial contributions to the knowledge and conservation of birds in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Thayer observed and collected birds throughout much of St Vincent and on many of the Grenadines from January 1924 through to December 1925. Although he produced a preliminary manuscript containing interesting distributional notes and which is an early record of the region's ornithology, Thayer never published the results of his work in the islands. Some 413 bird and bird egg specimens have survived from his work in St Vincent and the Grenadines and are now housed in the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) and the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Four hundred and fifty eight specimens of birds and eggs collected by Gerald and his father, Abbott, from other countries are held in museums in the United States.


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