Studies on the Reproductive Biology of New Zealand Freshwater Eels

<p>Macroscopic and histological observations of the gonads from 1,739 non-migrant freshwater eels, the shortfin Anguilla australis schmidtii Phillipps and the longfin A. dieffenbachii Gray, showed that they pass through seven stages of development. Shortfins become sexually differentiated at body lengths of 35.0cm to 56.9cm and longfins at lengths of 50.0cm to 67.0cm. No intersexual stage was present, as in A. anguilla L., and although 1% of 350 migrating longfin males examined contained ribbon-like testes, the typical lobed organ of Syrski (testis) can be used as diagnostic of maleness. Histologically, the maximum stage of development attained in the non-migrant, immature stage, was spermatogonia in the males and vacuolated oocytes in females. At the time of seaward migration, based on gonad histology, gonadosomatic indices and ova diameters, migrating longfins were more sexually developed than shortfins. These differences may relate to the location of different oceanic spawning areas: that for the longfin possibly being closer to New Zealand. The autumnal migratory runs, from March to May, of the sexually maturing adults in the Makara stream showed no particular species or sex sequence. The movement of eels was coincident with a rise in stream level and the second half of the lunar cycle. Other relevant environmental factors are discussed. In Lake 0noke peak catches of seaward migrating shortfins were made before the longfins and movements of eels occurred throughout the lunar cycle. Once at sea, the eels apparently disappear. A published note is included on the first eel of the New Zealand species, a longfin female, to be caught at sea. Age determinations from 995 eels were made by otoliths, which were burnt lightly to intensify the growth zones for reading purposes. Shortfin males are younger than females at migration. Longfins are older than shortfins at migration but the males are younger than the females. In the non-migrant stage, sexually undifferentiated shortfins grow more slowly relative to the males, and males relatively more slowly than the females. Similar but less significant differences in growth occur in longfins. Migrant males held in seawater were induced to mature and spawn with injections of mammalian hormones or carp pituitaries, over temperatures of 11.8 degrees C to 28 degrees C. The maturation period was dependent on temperature. Testes of experimental eels that survived maturation regressed to the pre-migrant or migrant stage. Two eels that had regressed were induced to mature a second time. Females held at 20 degrees C and injected with mammalian hormones showed significant increases in sexual development but died before maturity. Females injected with carp pituitaries matured and spawned. Mature longfin eggs, 0.9mm to 1.2mm in diametar, and mature shortfin eggs, 0.9mm to 1.2mm in diameter, are translucent and contain one to many oil globules. A blastodisc formed in water hardened eggs but attempts at fertilization were unsuccessful. Gametogenesis, observed from non-migrant, migrant and hormone injected eels is similar to that described for other teleosts. Electron microscope observations showed parallel features of spermiogenesis in both species. Mature spermatozoa have crescent shaped heads with an anteriorly placed mitochondrion. A flagellum of the unusual 9 + 0 pattern arises from the posterior region of the head, and a short, striated rod-like structure is positioned adjacent to the main flagellum. A complex of subfibrils which extend along either side of the head to the mitochondrion arise from the proximal centriole.</p>

Studies on the Reproductive Biology of New Zealand Freshwater Eels

<p>Macroscopic and histological observations of the gonads from 1,739 non-migrant freshwater eels, the shortfin Anguilla australis schmidtii Phillipps and the longfin A. dieffenbachii Gray, showed that they pass through seven stages of development. Shortfins become sexually differentiated at body lengths of 35.0cm to 56.9cm and longfins at lengths of 50.0cm to 67.0cm. No intersexual stage was present, as in A. anguilla L., and although 1% of 350 migrating longfin males examined contained ribbon-like testes, the typical lobed organ of Syrski (testis) can be used as diagnostic of maleness. Histologically, the maximum stage of development attained in the non-migrant, immature stage, was spermatogonia in the males and vacuolated oocytes in females. At the time of seaward migration, based on gonad histology, gonadosomatic indices and ova diameters, migrating longfins were more sexually developed than shortfins. These differences may relate to the location of different oceanic spawning areas: that for the longfin possibly being closer to New Zealand. The autumnal migratory runs, from March to May, of the sexually maturing adults in the Makara stream showed no particular species or sex sequence. The movement of eels was coincident with a rise in stream level and the second half of the lunar cycle. Other relevant environmental factors are discussed. In Lake 0noke peak catches of seaward migrating shortfins were made before the longfins and movements of eels occurred throughout the lunar cycle. Once at sea, the eels apparently disappear. A published note is included on the first eel of the New Zealand species, a longfin female, to be caught at sea. Age determinations from 995 eels were made by otoliths, which were burnt lightly to intensify the growth zones for reading purposes. Shortfin males are younger than females at migration. Longfins are older than shortfins at migration but the males are younger than the females. In the non-migrant stage, sexually undifferentiated shortfins grow more slowly relative to the males, and males relatively more slowly than the females. Similar but less significant differences in growth occur in longfins. Migrant males held in seawater were induced to mature and spawn with injections of mammalian hormones or carp pituitaries, over temperatures of 11.8 degrees C to 28 degrees C. The maturation period was dependent on temperature. Testes of experimental eels that survived maturation regressed to the pre-migrant or migrant stage. Two eels that had regressed were induced to mature a second time. Females held at 20 degrees C and injected with mammalian hormones showed significant increases in sexual development but died before maturity. Females injected with carp pituitaries matured and spawned. Mature longfin eggs, 0.9mm to 1.2mm in diametar, and mature shortfin eggs, 0.9mm to 1.2mm in diameter, are translucent and contain one to many oil globules. A blastodisc formed in water hardened eggs but attempts at fertilization were unsuccessful. Gametogenesis, observed from non-migrant, migrant and hormone injected eels is similar to that described for other teleosts. Electron microscope observations showed parallel features of spermiogenesis in both species. Mature spermatozoa have crescent shaped heads with an anteriorly placed mitochondrion. A flagellum of the unusual 9 + 0 pattern arises from the posterior region of the head, and a short, striated rod-like structure is positioned adjacent to the main flagellum. A complex of subfibrils which extend along either side of the head to the mitochondrion arise from the proximal centriole.</p>

Multi-Head Attention-Based Long Short-Term Memory for Depression Detection From Speech

Depression is a mental disorder that threatens the health and normal life of people. Hence, it is essential to provide an effective way to detect depression. However, research on depression detection mainly focuses on utilizing different parallel features from audio, video, and text for performance enhancement regardless of making full usage of the inherent information from speech. To focus on more emotionally salient regions of depression speech, in this research, we propose a multi-head time-dimension attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) model. We first extract frame-level features to store the original temporal relationship of a speech sequence and then analyze their difference between speeches of depression and those of health status. Then, we study the performance of various features and use a modified feature set as the input of the LSTM layer. Instead of using the output of the traditional LSTM, multi-head time-dimension attention is employed to obtain more key time information related to depression detection by projecting the output into different subspaces. The experimental results show the proposed model leads to improvements of 2.3 and 10.3% over the LSTM model on the Distress Analysis Interview Corpus-Wizard of Oz (DAIC-WOZ) and the Multi-modal Open Dataset for Mental-disorder Analysis (MODMA) corpus, respectively.

Real-time Issues in the Ada Parallel Model with OpenMP

The current proposal for the next revision of the Ada language considers the possibility to map the language parallel features to an underlying OpenMP runtime. As previously presented, and discussed in previous workshops, the works on fine-grain parallelism in Ada map well to the OpenMP tasking model for parallelism. Nevertheless, and although the general model of integration, and the semantic constructs are already reflected in the proposed revision of the standard, the integration of these new features with the Real-Time Systems Annex of Ada is still not complete. This paper presents an overview of what is supported and the still open issues.

The Effect of Hierarchy on Moral Silence in Healthcare: What Can the Holocaust Teach Us?

Physicians, nurses, and healthcare professional students openly (and in many cases, eagerly) participated in the medical atrocities of the Shoah. In this paper, a physician-bioethicist and nurse-bioethicist examine the role of hierarchical power imbalances in medical education, which often occur because trainees are instructed ‘to do so’ by their superiors during medical education and clinical care. We will first examine the nature of medical and nursing education under National Socialism: were there cultural, educational, moral and legal pressures which entrenched professional hierarchies and thereby commanded obedience in the face of an ever-diminishing individual and collective conscience? We will then outline relevant parallel features in modern medical education, including the effects of hierarchy in shaping ethical decision making and conscience formation. We then propose several solutions for the prevention of the negative effects of hierarchical power imbalances in medical education: (1) universal Holocaust education in medical and nursing schools; (2) formative and experiential ethics instruction, which teaches students to ‘speak up’ when ethical issues arise; (3) acceptance of, and adherence to, a personalistic philosophical anthropology in healthcare; (4) support for rigorous conscience protection laws for minority ethical views that respect the role of integrity without compromising patient care.

The Christian Year and the Consolations of Synchronized Time

This chapter shows how the material arrangements and the chronometrics of Keble’s bestselling devotional volume are parallel features. The consolations of The Christian Year were such that they calibrated readers not only to the long time of the liturgical year but also synchronized them to clock time. While many contemporary readers lauded The Christian Year for its soothing properties, its long Victorian print afterlife is indicative of how devotion was being redefined as that century went on as a set of reading practices premised upon distraction and divided time. The eventual work of The Christian Year, in other words, was to console its readers according to a new realization of the replicable, interval time of modernity.

Hybrid visual natural landmark–based localization for indoor mobile robots

Localization is a crucial part of autonomous moving for the indoor mobile robot. The natural features of the ceiling and surrounding environment can serve for position estimation. Based on these natural features, a hybrid visual natural landmarks–based localization method is proposed. We combine the landmarks-based positioning with ceiling-based visual odometry. During the visual odometry, the orientation is computed from the parallel features between the adjacent frames. The position is calculated from the corresponding point features in the two consecutive images using the perspective-n-point method. During the natural landmarks–based localization, the orientation filter is utilized to obtain the global orientation. Then, the feature points are determined by the Compute Unified Device Architecture–based scale-invariant feature transform algorithm. Finally, the position is estimated based on the computed orientation and point features. Various experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed localization method outperforms other methods in accuracy and efficiency.

CRISPR/Cas9 and active genetics-based trans-species replacement of the endogenous Drosophila kni-L2 CRM reveals unexpected complexity

The knirps (kni) locus encodes transcription factors required for induction of the L2 wing vein in Drosophila. Here, we employ diverse CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing tools to generate a series of targeted lesions within the endogenous cis-regulatory module (CRM) required for kni expression in the L2 vein primordium. Phenotypic analysis of these ‘in locus’ mutations based on both expression of Kni protein and adult wing phenotypes, reveals novel unexpected features of L2-CRM function including evidence for a chromosome pairing-dependent process that promotes transcription. We also demonstrate that self-propagating active genetic elements (CopyCat elements) can efficiently delete and replace the L2-CRM with orthologous sequences from other divergent fly species. Wing vein phenotypes resulting from these trans-species enhancer replacements parallel features of the respective donor fly species. This highly sensitive phenotypic readout of enhancer function in a native genomic context reveals novel features of CRM function undetected by traditional reporter gene analysis.