Mussels and Local Conditions Interact to Influence Microbial Communities in Mussel Beds

Microbiomes are increasingly recognized as widespread regulators of function from individual organism to ecosystem scales. However, the manner in which animals influence the structure and function of environmental microbiomes has received considerably less attention. Using a comparative field study, we investigated the relationship between freshwater mussel microbiomes and environmental microbiomes. We used two focal species of unionid mussels, Amblema plicata and Actinonaias ligamentina, with distinct behavioral and physiological characteristics. Mussel microbiomes, those of the shell and biodeposits, were less diverse than both surface and subsurface sediment microbiomes. Mussel abundance was a significant predictor of sediment microbial community composition, but mussel species richness was not. Our data suggest that local habitat conditions which change dynamically along streams, such as discharge, water turnover, and canopy cover, work in tandem to influence environmental microbial community assemblages at discreet rather than landscape scales. Further, mussel burrowing activity and mussel shells may provide habitat for microbial communities critical to nutrient cycling in these systems.

Artist’s Psychophysiology in Disposition to Style (Case Study of Lesia Ukrainka’s Biography Materials)

Purpose of the study is to shed light on the role of psychophysiology in the creative process, namely, the style corrections connected with pathological changes in the artist’s organism, deviating from empirical-descriptive methods. Theoretical basis of the study implies the interpretation of the notions style and disease not in their narrow professional limitation but from the standpoint of expanding the parameters of these concepts to philosophical dimensions. Based on the principle of analogy, the research findings prove that non-mimetic creative process ("pure" action) manifests itself exclusively in connection with a human from a bodily viewpoint through anthropological mimesis, which can program the propensity to certain capabilities of the individual organism (both psycho-physiological and in its creative and stylistic manifestations). C. G. Jung was the first who pointed to the productivity of this method in his work "Theoretical Reflections on the Nature of the Psyche". The creativity phenomenon (and its most specific feature – style) reflects not only "pure" psychology and the intellectual and spiritual component but also its relation to the artist as a physical being. It, outside its belonging to and being conditioned by transcendent factors, includes a quantitative aspect related to the moment of intensity. The disease (quantitative-intensive indicator) acts to some extent as a stimulator of the production/change of aesthetic enzyme ("The Obsessed" by Lesia Ukrainka). In this context, the dialectic method is also effective because the subject of study cannot be comprehensively argued using naturalistic approaches only and requires (according to A. Losev) a semantic explanation too. The essence of it is the logic of contradictions. In this case, the antinomy of matter-spirit plays a conceptual role in the projection on the plane of word-formation. Originality of the research findings is in the expansion of the causal relationship range of the creative process, namely the inclusion of the factor of psycho-physiological pathology into the system artist-work. This factor performs important stylistic functions. Conclusions. In contrast to scientific studies, where 1) style is analyzed separately (mostly in terms of text landscape description) and 2) the figure of the artist (mainly – in the parameters of empiricism, rarely – in psychoanalytic perspective), this study argues the need to correlate these issues, taking them beyond descriptiveness to avoid schematics and one-dimensionality.

The Tangled Bank

Why are there so many kinds of organisms, and why do they cluster into discrete groups associated with particular locales? These and other ecological questions find answers in the expansive version of evolution that is presently emerging. Heredity, variation, natural selection, and adaptation are rooted in the level of genes, but incorporate features that grow out of the many tiers of biological organization. The communitarian view of life complements the one focused on the individual organism, and requires us to reexamine the meaning of both organism and individual. It embraces broad-gauge phenomena such as nutrient cycles, and gave birth to Gaia: the vision of Earth as a self-regulating system that has kept our planet hospitable to life for nearly 4 billion years.

Non-negative Intensity for Target Strength Identification in Marine Ecosystem Research

In this paper, we propose non-negative intensity (NNI) as an alternative intensity-based technique for target strength identification in marine ecosystem research. NNI identifies local surface regions of a body with positive-only sound power contributions. NNI is employed for sound scattering by fluid-loaded, fluid-filled elastic structures with weak scattering boundary conditions. Three numerical case studies are presented for which fully coupled fluid-structure interaction models based on the finite element method (FEM) and the boundary element method (BEM) are developed. To validate the three-way coupling between the structural and fluid domains, an elastic shell submerged in water and filled with different internal fluids is initially considered. Results for the scattered acoustic intensity obtained numerically are compared with analytical results from the literature. Models representing Antarctic krill of simple and complex geometry are developed. A 3×3 cylinder array representing a simplified aggregation of krill is also presented. Target strength is calculated using both the scattered intensity and NNI for different incident excitation angles. Results for NNI identify the surface regions of an individual organism or group of organisms with the greatest contribution to the scattered sound at the target strength locations.

A Study of Our Knowledge of Persons with Special Reference to the Work of Dr. Martin Buber

<p>The field of philosophy is wide and varied, and often appears to be remote from the common life of men. Yet this remoteness is only superficial for the problems with which philosophy deals arise in the first instance from questions which occur to the man in the street, though he may not pursue them systematically. He cannot avoid meeting them, though he may avoid trying to answer them. What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the universe? Is the ordering of nature, of society of the individual organism quite fortuitous or according to some unwritten law? How do we know other people and objects? What is the nature of God? That these questions are dependent upon human reflection is not hard to see. They arise out of reflection, and they depend to a greater or less degree upon reflection for their answer. But we may go further and question reflection itself: What is the nature of reflection? What is its subject matter? Is reflection reliable? In other words, “How do we know?” The examination of this question constitutes that aspect of philosophy known as “Epistemology”, and upon the answer to that question the fate of philosophy depends to a great extent.</p>

A Study of Our Knowledge of Persons with Special Reference to the Work of Dr. Martin Buber

<p>The field of philosophy is wide and varied, and often appears to be remote from the common life of men. Yet this remoteness is only superficial for the problems with which philosophy deals arise in the first instance from questions which occur to the man in the street, though he may not pursue them systematically. He cannot avoid meeting them, though he may avoid trying to answer them. What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the universe? Is the ordering of nature, of society of the individual organism quite fortuitous or according to some unwritten law? How do we know other people and objects? What is the nature of God? That these questions are dependent upon human reflection is not hard to see. They arise out of reflection, and they depend to a greater or less degree upon reflection for their answer. But we may go further and question reflection itself: What is the nature of reflection? What is its subject matter? Is reflection reliable? In other words, “How do we know?” The examination of this question constitutes that aspect of philosophy known as “Epistemology”, and upon the answer to that question the fate of philosophy depends to a great extent.</p>

Large-bodied birds are over-represented in unstructured citizen science data

Citizen science platforms are quickly accumulating hundreds of millions of biodiversity observations around the world annually. Quantifying and correcting for the biases in citizen science datasets remains an important first step before these data are used to address ecological questions and monitor biodiversity. One source of potential bias among datasets is the difference between those citizen science programs that have unstructured protocols and those that have semi-structured or structured protocols for submitting observations. To quantify biases in an unstructured citizen science platform, we contrasted bird observations from the unstructured iNaturalist platform with that from a semi-structured citizen science platform—eBird—for the continental United States. We tested whether four traits of species (body size, commonness, flock size, and color) predicted if a species was under- or over-represented in the unstructured dataset compared with the semi-structured dataset. We found strong evidence that large-bodied birds were over-represented in the unstructured citizen science dataset; moderate evidence that common species were over-represented in the unstructured dataset; strong evidence that species in large groups were over-represented; and no evidence that colorful species were over-represented in unstructured citizen science data. Our results suggest that biases exist in unstructured citizen science data when compared with semi-structured data, likely as a result of the detectability of a species and the inherent recording process. Importantly, in programs like iNaturalist the detectability process is two-fold—first, an individual organism needs to be detected, and second, it needs to be photographed, which is likely easier for many large-bodied species. Our results indicate that caution is warranted when using unstructured citizen science data in ecological modelling, and highlight body size as a fundamental trait that can be used as a covariate for modelling opportunistic species occurrence records, representing the detectability or identifiability in unstructured citizen science datasets. Future research in this space should continue to focus on quantifying and documenting biases in citizen science data, and expand our research by including structured citizen science data to understand how biases differ among unstructured, semi-structured, and structured citizen science platforms.

The Shared Origins of Embodiment and Development

As a domain of study centering on the nature of the body in the functioning of the individual organism, embodiment encompasses a diverse array of topics and questions. One useful organizing framework places embodiment as a bridge construct connecting three standpoints on the body: the form of the body, the body as actively engaged in and with the world, and the body as lived experience. Through connecting these standpoints, the construct of embodiment shows that they are not mutually exclusive: inherent in form is the capacity for engagement, and inherent in engagement is a lived perspective that confers agency and meaning. Here, we employ this framework to underscore the deep connections between embodiment and development. We begin with a discussion of the origins of multicellularity, highlighting how the evolution of bodies was the evolution of development itself. The evolution of the metazoan (animal) body is of particular interest, because most animals possess complex bodies with sensorimotor capacities for perceiving and acting that bring forth a particular sort of embodiment. However, we also emphasize that the thread of embodiment runs through all living things, which share an organizational property of self-determination that endows them with a specific kind of autonomy. This realization moves us away from a Cartesian machine metaphor and instead puts an emphasis on the lived perspective that arises from being embodied. This broad view of embodiment presents opportunities to transcend the boundaries of individual disciplines to create a novel integrative vision for the scientific study of development.

Empirical Implications

The initial success of the gene’s-eye view came from making sense of old problems in evolutionary biology, in particular those related to social behaviour. It also stimulated new empirical research areas. This chapter is about three such new areas. The first is extended phenotypes, which are examples of phenotypic effects that occur outside of the body in which a gene is located. The second area is greenbeard genes, which gets its name from the thought-experiment devised to show that for altruism to evolve it is the relatedness between the actor and the recipient at the locus underlying the altruistic behaviour that matters, not the genome-wide relatedness. Finally, selfish genetic elements are genetic elements that have the ability to promote their own transmission even if it come at the expense of the fitness of the individual organism. The chapter outlines the current understanding of these topics and the role of the gene’s-eye view in uncovering them.