scholarly journals Do orientation and substrate influence apparent turning biases by the 7-spot ladybird, Coccinella septempunctata?

Behaviour ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 157 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 205-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind K. Humphreys ◽  
Graeme D. Ruxton

Abstract How foraging predators explore their environment is a fundamental aspect of predator-prey interactions. Girling et al. (2007) tested Coccinella septempunctata in a Y-maze, finding that approximately 45% of individuals displayed significant turning biases. We extend the work of Girling et al. in three ways: (1) turning bias was tested on vertical as well as horizontal structures, (2) turning bias was tested on natural Y-shaped twigs as well as artificial twigs and (3) turning bias was recorded both as the pre-designated ‘left’ or ‘right’ physical branch selected and from the perspective of ladybirds. No significant patterns of ‘handedness’ were apparent with vertical orientation, on either substrate. With horizontal orientation, significant turning biases were exhibited on artificial but not natural twigs. Overall, although turning biases are theoretically efficient when searching branched structures, we propose that in natural environments ladybirds will base their foraging movements on environmental cues.

Perception ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 030100662110065
Author(s):  
Klaus Landwehr

The Oppel–Kundt illusion consists in the overestimation of the length of filled versus empty extents. Two experiments explored its relation to the horizontal-vertical illusion, which consists in the overestimation of the length of vertical versus horizontal extents, and to the oblique effect, which consists in poorer discriminative sensitivity for obliquely as opposed to horizontally or vertically oriented stimuli. For Experiment 1, Kundt’s (1863) original stimulus was rotated in steps of 45° full circle around 360°. For Experiment 2, one part of the stimulus remained at a horizontal or vertical orientation, whereas the other part was tilted 45° or 90°. The Oppel–Kundt illusion was at its maximum at a horizontal orientation of the stimulus. The illusion was strongly attenuated with L-type figures when the vertical part was empty, but not enhanced when this part was filled, suggesting that the horizontal-vertical illusion only acts on nontextured extents. There was no oblique effect.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Melek Deniz Paker ◽  
Murat Cinar

Abstract A significant portion of world oil reserves reside in naturally fractured reservoirs and a considerable amount of these resources includes heavy oil and bitumen. Thermal enhanced oil recovery methods (EOR) are mostly applied in heavy oil reservoirs to improve oil recovery. In situ combustion (/SC) is one of the thermal EOR methods that could be applicable in a variety of reservoirs. Unlike steam, heat is generated in situ due to the injection of air or oxygen enriched air into a reservoir. Energy is provided by multi-step reactions between oxygen and the fuel at particular temperatures underground. This method upgrades the oil in situ while the heaviest fraction of the oil is burned during the process. The application of /SC in fractured reservoirs is challenging since the injected air would flow through the fracture and a small portion of oil in the/near fracture would react with the injected air. Only a few researchers have studied /SC in fractured or high permeability contrast systems experimentally. For in situ combustion to be applied in fractured systems in an efficient way, the underlying mechanism needs to be understood. In this study, the major focus is permeability variation that is the most prominent feature of fractured systems. The effect of orientation and width of the region with higher permeability on the sustainability of front propagation are studied. The contrast in permeability was experimentally simulated with sand of different particle size. These higher permeability regions are analogous to fractures within a naturally fractured rock. Several /SC tests with sand-pack were carried out to obtain a better understanding of the effect of horizontal vertical, and combined (both vertical and horizontal) orientation of the high permeability region with respect to airflow to investigate the conditions that are required for a self-sustained front propagation and to understand the fundamental behavior. Within the experimental conditions of the study, the test results showed that combustion front propagated faster in the higher permeability region. In addition, horizontal orientation almost had no effect on the sustainability of the front; however, it affected oxygen consumption, temperature, and velocity of the front. On the contrary, the vertical orientation of the higher permeability region had a profound effect on the sustainability of the combustion front. The combustion behavior was poorer for the tests with vertical orientation, yet the produced oil AP/ gravity was higher. Based on the experimental results a mechanism has been proposed to explain the behavior of combustion front in systems with high permeability contrast.


Author(s):  
Lilin Chu ◽  
Yulong Ji ◽  
Chunrong Yu ◽  
Yantao Li ◽  
Hongbin Ma ◽  
...  

Abstract In order to understand the heat transfer performance, startup and fluid flow condition of oscillating heat pipe (OHP) with hydraulic diameter far exceeding the maximum hydraulic diameter (MHD), an experimental investigation on heat transfer performance and visualization was conducted. From the experimental performance, it is found that the OHP can still work well with ethanol as the working fluid when the tube diameter has exceeded the MHD of 91.6%. In addition, the detailed flow patterns of the OHP were recorded by a highspeed camera for vertical and horizontal orientation to understand its physical mechanism. In the vertical orientation, initially working fluid generates small bubbles, and then the small bubbles coalesce and grow to vapor plugs, the vapor plugs finally pushes the liquid slugs to oscillate in the tube. In the horizontal orientation, the working fluid surface fluctuates due to the vapors flow from the evaporator to the condenser and bubbles burst in the evaporator. When the peak of liquid wave reaches the upper surface of tube, a liquid slug has been formed, and then the steam flow pushes the liquid slugs to oscillate in the tube.


Behaviour ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 144 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Hassall ◽  
John Turner ◽  
Robbie Girling

AbstractThe hypothesis that foraging male and female Coccinella septempunctata L. would exhibit a turning bias when walking along a branched linear wire in a Y-maze was tested. Individuals were placed repeatedly in the maze. Approximately 45% of all individuals tested displayed significant turning biases, with a similar number of individuals biased to the left and right. In the maze right-handed individuals turned right at 84.4% of turns and the left-handed individuals turned left at 80.2% of turns. A model of the searching efficiency of C. septempunctata in dichotomous branched environments showed that model coccinellids with greater turning biases discovered a higher proportion of the plant for a given number of searches than those with no bias. A modification of the model to investigate foraging efficiency, by calculating the mean time taken by individuals to find randomly distributed aphid patches, suggested that on four different sizes of plants, with a variety of aphid patch densities, implementing a turning bias was a significantly more efficient foraging strategy than no bias. In general the benefits to foraging of implementing a turning bias increased with the degree of the bias. It may be beneficial for individuals in highly complex branched environments to have a turning bias slightly lower than 100% in order to benefit from increased foraging efficiency without walking in circles. Foraging bias benefits increased with increasing plant size and decreasing aphid density. In comparisons of two different plant morphologies, one with a straight stem and side branches and one with a symmetrically branched morphology, there were few significant differences in the effects of turning biases on foraging efficiency between morphologies.


Author(s):  
R. E. Vieira ◽  
N. R. Kesana ◽  
B. S. McLaury ◽  
S. A. Shirazi

Low-liquid loading (LLL) and annular gas-liquid flow patterns are commonly encountered in gas transportation pipelines. They may also occur in other off-shore production facilities such as gas/condensate production systems. Experience gained from production of hydrocarbons has shown that severe degradation of production equipment will occur due to sand entrained in gas-dominant multiphase flows. Sand erosion in multiphase flows is a complex phenomenon since several factors influence the particle impact velocity with the wall. In order to give a more comprehensive understanding of the particle erosion process in this particular scenario and to improve the current semi-mechanistic models, erosion and sand distribution measurements were conducted on 76.2 mm (3 inch) and 101.6 mm (4 inch) diameter pipes in a large scale multiphase flow loop with varying gas (air) and liquid (water) velocities generating low-liquid loading and annular conditions. Particle sizes used in the experiments were 150 and 300 microns with the latter being sharper than the former. Erosion measurements were made at sixteen different locations on a 76.2 mm (3 inch) standard elbow using ultrasonic technology, whereas Electrical Resistance (ER) probes were used for the measurements in a 101.6 mm (4 inch) diameter pipe. The experiments were primarily performed in the upward vertical orientation but a few measurements were performed in the horizontal orientation. Results suggest that the erosion is an order of magnitude higher when the pipe is oriented vertically compared to horizontal orientation. Also, the location of maximum erosion is identified for these flow patterns and it is not dependent on the pipe inclination.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chenhao Li ◽  
Lisa Tucker-Kellogg ◽  
Niranjan Nagarajan

AbstractA growing body of literature points to the important roles that different microbial communities play in diverse natural environments and the human body. The dynamics of these communities is driven by a range of microbial interactions from symbiosis to predator-prey relationships, the majority of which are poorly understood, making it hard to predict the response of the community to different perturbations. With the increasing availability of high-throughput sequencing based community composition data, it is now conceivable to directly learn models that explicitly define microbial interactions and explain community dynamics. The applicability of these approaches is however affected by several experimental limitations, particularly the compositional nature of sequencing data. We present a new computational approach (BEEM) that addresses this key limitation in the inference of generalised Lotka-Volterra models (gLVMs) by coupling biomass estimation and model inference in an expectation maximization like algorithm (BEEM). Surprisingly, BEEM outperforms state-of-the-art methods for inferring gLVMs, while simultaneously eliminating the need for additional experimental biomass data as input. BEEM’s application to previously inaccessible public datasets (due to the lack of biomass data) allowed us for the first time to analyse microbial communities in the human gut on a per individual basis, revealing personalised dynamics and keystone species.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Sagban Saadoon

This study  was carried out in order to explore the behaviour of RC deep beams strengthening with CFRP strips. Eight simply supported deep beams were fabricated and tested under four-points loading scenario. Three different orientations for CFRP strips were used for strengthening the RC deep beams ; vertical, horizontal and inclined. All of the tested  samples were of the same dimensions, concrete strength and steel reinforcement. A percentage increase in load carrying capacity of 48, 19 and 38% (with respect to the unstrengthened beam) was gained for beams strengthened with vertical, horizontal and inclined FRP strips, respectively. It was concluded that the strengthening with FRP strips of vertical fabric orientation is more efficient than strengthening with horizontal or inclined orientation since the vertical orientation gives the highest load carrying capacity, largest deflections at ultimate load and smallest crack width. On the other hand, applied the FRP strips in  a horizontal orientation   was  insufficient for the strengthening purposes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 2050039
Author(s):  
Jorge Chamorro-Padial ◽  
Rosa Rodríguez-Sánchez

This paper proposes a new method of dimensionality reduction when performing Text Classification, by applying the discrete wavelet transform to the document-term frequencies matrix. We analyse the features provided by the wavelet coefficients from the different orientations: (1) The high energy coefficients in the horizontal orientation correspond to relevant terms in a single document. (2) The high energy coefficients in the vertical orientation correspond to relevant terms for a single document, but not for the others. (3) The high energy coefficients in the diagonal orientation correspond to relevant terms in a document in comparison to other terms. If we filter using the wavelet coefficients and fulfil these three conditions simultaneously, we can obtain a reduced vocabulary of the corpus, with less dimensions than in the original one. To test the success of the reduced vocabulary, we recoded the corpus with the new reduced vocabulary and we obtained a statistically relevant level of accuracy for document classification.


1981 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Shefsky

Subjects were asked to indicate, by a simple motor response, the presence or absence of a word (signal) in unilaterally presented five-letter words and nonwords (noise). Both vertical and horizontal orientation of stimuli were employed. Detection accuracy ( d') did not differ between visual hemifields and was greater for horizontal than for vertical orientation. Decision making was more conservative for left-hemifield presentation and more conservative for vertical orientation. Models of perceptual asymmetry based on structural differences between cerebral hemispheres are weakened by the results.


2019 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
pp. 1563-1570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zefeng Li ◽  
Egill Hauksson ◽  
Jennifer Andrews

Abstract Modern seismic networks commonly equip a station with multiple sensors, to extend the frequency band and the dynamic range of data recorded at the station. In addition, in our recent study we showed that comparison of data from co‐located seismometers and accelerometers is useful for detecting instrument malfunctions and monitoring data quality. In this study, we extend comparison of data from different co‐located sensors to two other applications: (1) amplitude calibration for data from vertical short‐period sensors with strong‐motion sensors as baseline and (2) measurement of orientation discrepancy between strong‐motion and broadband sensors. We perform systematic analyses of data recorded by the California Institute of Technology/U.S. Geological Survey Southern California Seismic Network. In the first application, we compare the amplitude of data from vertical short‐period sensors to that of data from co‐located strong‐motion sensors and measure the amplitude calibration factors for 93 short‐period sensors. Among them, 49 stations are measured at ∼1.0, 42 measured at ∼0.6, as well as two outlying stations: GFF at 0.3 and CHI at 1.3. These values are found to be related to the sensors’ sensitivity values. In the second application, we measure orientation discrepancy between 222 co‐located broadband and strong‐motion sensors. All the vertical orientation differences are found to be within 5°. However, the horizontal orientation differences of 22 stations are greater than 6°, among which four stations have reverse rotation or 180° from the expected orientation. These measurements have been communicated to network operators and fixes are being applied. This study, together with our previously developed data monitoring framework, demonstrates that comparison of different co‐located sensors is a simple and effective tool for a broad range of seismic data assessment and instrument calibration.


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