An assessment of the underlying relationship between land transportation and climate change: Case study Mauritius

Introduction: Land transportation encompasses the movement of people and goods and is therefore a major contributor of global greenhouses gases. The main share of such emissions is mostly from the release of carbon dioxide into the air as a result of burning transportation fuels obtained from petroleum, a major driver of climate change. While today the defining issue is a changing climate, the number of vehicles on roads keep on rising around the world. Materials and methods: This study assessed the relationship between land transportation and climate change using a system dynamics model based on a 3-layered taxonomy using Mauritius Island as case study. Over 100 papers were analyzed and the variables that link land transportation and climate change in the Mauritian context were selected and a taxonomy divided into sub-units was built. Results: This innovative taxonomy was divided into 3 sections related to the land transportation sector including a vehicle layer, transport system layer and society layer. Using these variables, three stock and flow diagrams were constructed on Vensim, namely climate change impacts, transport related carbon dioxide and socio-economic models. Conclusion: While there is a complex relationship between land transportation and climate change globally, Mauritius must find ways to become more climate friendly in the land transportation sector.

The Unpredictable Lightness of History in Nicolas Cavaillès’ Novellas on the Mauritius Islands

Nicolas Cavaillès ponders on a philosophy of history mixed with humour and irony in his historical narratives of remote islands in the Indian Ocean in two of his novellas: Life of Mr. Legaut (the story of a Huguenot who is forced to leave his native France and travels to these islands) and The Dead on the Donkey, where the wanderings of un unfortunate donkey across the Mauritius Island allow the narrator to relate the history of the island and its tragic trajectory to modernity. The idea of Western history as progressive evolution is rolled upside down with irony in Cavaillès's philosophical reflection on the circumstances leading to colonial expeditions in Life of Mr. Leguat (2013) and in the successive destruction of the Mauritius Island in the novella The Dead on the Donkey (2018). If Cavaillès builds his books hermeneutically, he also defies hermeneutics by denying all forms of possible understanding of the events described. The actions of his protagonists, human or animal, are the result of circumstances that are well known, but so absurd that they cannot form a historical narrative. If they did, this narrative would look like a hybrid of Beckett's absurd and Cioran's despair. Anti-Hegelian, since history here does not lead to individual freedom, Cavaillès's conception of history equally challenges Nietzsche's representation of unhistorical temporality in an attempt to solve humanity’s relation to the past for enacting a more desirable future. In far away Edenic islands, colonized by powerful states and inhabited by human and animal slaves, no philosophy could make sense of history.

Optimal voluntary and mandatory insect repellent usage and emigration strategies to control the chikungunya outbreak on Reunion Island

In 2005, a chikungunya virus outbreak devastated the tropical island of Reunion, infecting a third of the total population. Motivated by the Reunion Island case study, we investigate the theoretic potential for two intervention measures under both voluntary and mandatory protocols to control a vector-borne disease when there is risk of the disease becoming endemic. The first measure uses insect repellent to prevent mosquito bites, while the second involves emigrating to the neighboring Mauritius Island to avoid infection. There is a threshold on the cost of using repellent above which both voluntary and mandatory regimes find it optimal to forgo usage. Below that threshold, mandatory usage protocols will eradicate the disease; however, voluntary adoption leaves the disease at a small endemic level. Emigrating from the island to avoid infection results in a tragedy-of-the-commons effect: while being potentially beneficial to specific susceptible individuals, the remaining islanders paradoxically face a higher risk of infection. Mandated relocation of susceptible individuals away from the epidemic is viable only if the cost of this relocation is several magnitudes lower than the cost of infection. Since this assumption is unlikely to hold for chikungunya, it is optimal to discourage such emigration for the benefit of the entire population. An underlying assumption about the conservation of human-vector encounter rates in mosquito biting behavior informs our conclusions and may warrant additional experimental verification.

When European meets African honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) in the tropics: Morphological changes related to genetics in Mauritius Island (South-West Indian Ocean)

The previous genetic characterization of the honeybee population of Mauritius Island (Indian Ocean) revealed an ongoing process of hybridization between the first established African subspecies Apis mellifera unicolor and recently imported European subspecies (A. m. ligustica, A. m. carnica and A. m. mellifera). This context offers the rare opportunity to explore the influence of hybridization between African and European honeybees on phenotypic traits out of the case largely studied of the Africanized honeybee (hybrid between A. m. scutellata from South Africa and European subspecies). We thus conducted geometric morphometric analyses on forewings of 283 workers genetically characterized at 14 microsatellite loci to evaluate (1) if the morphological variability coincides well with the neutral genetic variability, (2) if hybrids exhibited rather parental, intermediate or transgressive traits, and (3) to test if fluctuating asymmetry (FA) of size and shape, as a measure of developmental stability, was elevated in hybrids (due to genetic stress) and/or European bees (due to unsuitable environment) compared to African bees. A strong concordance was found between morphological variability and neutral genetic variability, especially for wing shape, based on partial least-square analyses (PLS). However, on average, the morphology of hybrids was more similar to the African bees, potentially reflecting the dynamics and direction of introgression. Significant FA for wing size as well as wing shape was detected, suggesting the overall presence of stress during the development of the studied individuals. In contrast, the asymmetry levels do not differ according to the ancestry (African, European or hybrid) of the individuals. Therefore, if ongoing hybridization contributed to increasing the genetic and phenotypic diversity of the populations and influences its adaptive potential, developmental stressors could not be identified and their evolutionary consequences remain uncertain.

New records of phytoseiid mites from Mauritius Island (Acari: Mesostigmata)

Mauritius is one of the three main islands constituting Mascareignes Archipelago, with La Réunion and Rodrigues. So far, fourteen mite species of the family Phytoseiidae had been reported from this island. We report in this paper the results of a survey conducted at the end of 2018 in Mauritius Island, in which 12 additional species were firstly recorded.