The omnipresent power of the invisible: From viruses to being conscious

According to Mayan cosmology, the law of time is represented as the energy factored by time equals to art. Time is a form of biological information. Time in-forms life, in such a way that life forms processes time as information and externalize it specific forms into the three-dimensional world, then time is the principle ordering of life. Indeed, everything in the natural order of the cosmos is beauty and harmony. All life forms on planet earth have their phases of morphological development, this is real even in the social structure of communities of living beings that also may have an aesthetic or artistic quality. This form and measurements of all things constitutes the entire or holistic order of the universe. So, if life is it nothing more than better-informed matter, where does this information come from? Socrates and Platon held that nothing in nature and in the world can be explained by random or chance, as Democritus would have argued, that nature creations occur because they have a Purpose. According to Platon, the natural world is a designer’s result demiurge or a universal consciousness that sets everything in the best possible place. So, if there is a start point where intelligence creates order, where there is order, there is purpose so; what is the purpose then? This work tends to give an answer and show a different perspective of living, studying and understanding (micro)biological phenomena in order to become conscious and assume that Nature is infinitely more powerful than us, the Whole is more than the sum of parts, we are part of it.

Niche overlap of benthic macrofauna in a tropical estuary: diurnal variation

The complexity of estuaries allows for the establishment of diverse communities composed of species with different survival strategies. The vertical migration of animals in the sediment is linked to competition, escape from predators and adaptations to diurnal physio-chemical changes related to variations in water levels. The present study aimed to evaluate niche overlap and amplitude, as well as the composition and structure, of communities of polychaetes and molluscs between sediment aliquots during the day and at night. Data sampling was performed in the Tubarão River estuary. The highest individual occurrence was registered during the diurnal period. Communities of polychaetes varied significantly between sediment aliquots during the day and at night, while molluscs did not show diurnal variation. Niche overlap results for polychaetes showed higher values between aliquots during the night, while molluscs showed greater overlap during the day. This indicates that polychaetes and molluscs have different mechanisms of coexistence. This may be related to different attributes of species allowing for the division of resources among individuals. Examination of niche overlap provides insights into coexistence of mechanisms within benthic macroinvertebrate communities.

Random intersection graphs with communities

Random intersection graphs model networks with communities, assuming an underlying bipartite structure of communities and individuals, where these communities may overlap. We generalize the model, allowing for arbitrary community structures within the communities. In our new model, communities may overlap, and they have their own internal structure described by arbitrary finite community graphs. Our model turns out to be tractable. We analyze the overlapping structure of the communities, show local weak convergence (including convergence of subgraph counts), and derive the asymptotic degree distribution and the local clustering coefficient.

Database “Childfree (antinatalist) communities in the social network VKontakte”

The database contains an upload of text comments in Russian from the social network VKontakte in .csv format (UTF-8 encoding). The comments are collected from communities, which discuss pregnancy, childhood, motherhood, paternity, etc. The upload contains comments under the posts with which the interaction took place. The absolute amount of likes is used as a criterion (comments are collected where the number of likes is greater than or equal to 5). The text data is processed (stemmization and lemmatization). The data are suitable for thematic analysis (e.g. LDA — Latent Dirichlet Allocation), sentiment analysis of statements, modelling the graph structure of communities (the link_comment variable contains a unique identifier of the post, link_author contains a unique user identifier), and forming a dictionary of demographic connotation in Russian. Sentiment analysis of statements enables measuring the dynamics of «demographic temperature» in antinatalist communities. The database is a supplement to the publication Kalabikhina IE, Banin EP (2020) Database «Pro-family (pronatalist) communities in the social network VKontakte». Population and Economics 4(3): 98–130. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e60915.

Freeze tolerance in neotropical frogs: an intrageneric comparison using Pristimantis species of high elevation and medium elevation

Paramos are high-elevation tropical Andean ecosystems above the tree line that display variable temperature and frequent freezing spells. Because a significant anuran community lives in this environment, physiological protection against freezing must characterise individuals in this community. Antifreeze protection has been studied in amphibians from other communities, and it is likely that Paramo anurans rely on the same underlying molecules that convey such protection to Nearctic species. However, given the pervasive presence of freezing spells in the Paramos year-round, the processes of activating protection mechanisms may differ from that of seasonal counterparts. Accordingly, this study investigated cryoprotection strategies in high-elevation tropical frogs, using as a model the terrestrial and nocturnal genus Pristimantis, specifically P. bogotensis, P. elegans and P. nervicus from Paramos, and the warm ecosystem counterparts P. insignitus, P. megalops and P. sanctaemartae. We focused on freeze tolerance and its relationship with glucose accumulation and ice formation. Under field conditions, the highest elevation P. nervicus exhibited higher glucose concentration at dawn compared to noon (1.7 ± 0.6 mmol/L versus 3.5 ± 1.32 mmol/L). Under experimental thermal freeze exposure for 2 hours between −2 and −4 ºC, the glucose concentration of the three Paramo species increased but physiological diversity was evident (P. nervicus 126%; P. bogotensis 100%; and P. elegans 55%). During this test, body ice formation was assessed calorimetrically. The species with the highest body ice formation was P. bogotensis (17% ± 5.37; maximum value: 63%; n = 8), followed by P. nervicus (5% ± 3.27; maximum value: 11%; n = 5) and P. elegans (0.34% ± 0.09; maximum value: 1%; n = 4). The study shows physiological diversity both within a genus and across the amphibian community around the freezing contour. Overall, Paramo species differ in freezing physiology from their low-elevation counterparts. Thus, climate shifts increasing freezing spells may affect the structure of communities in this zone.

The Influence of NMI against Modularity in Community Detection Problem: A Case Study for Unsigned and Signed Networks

Community detection is useful for better understanding the structure of complex networks. It aids in the extraction of the required information from such networks and has a vital role in different fields that range from healthcare to regional geography, economics, human interactions, and mobility. The method for detecting the structure of communities involves the partitioning of complex networks into groups of nodes, with extensive connections within community and sparse connections with other communities. In the literature, two main measures, namely the Modularity (Q) and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) have been used for evaluating the validation and quality of the detected community structures. Although many optimization algorithms have been implemented to unfold the structures of communities, the influence of NMI on the Q, and vice versa, between a detected partition and the correct partition in signed and unsigned networks is unclear. For this reason, in this paper, we investigate the correlation between Q and NMI in signed and unsigned networks. The results show that there is no direct relationship between Q and NMI in both types of networks.

MACROPHYTE-ASSOCIATED MACROINVERTEBRATES OF HETEROGENEOUS WATER BODIES OF THE VOLOGDA REGION, RUSSIA

In august 2018, fauna of aquatic macroinvertabrates from Persicaria amphibia (L.) Delarbre, Butomus umbellatus L. and Potamogeton perfoliatus L. was studied in Kubenskoe Lake as well as in Vozhe Lake and Mologa River in order to compare the phytophilic and bottom fauna of heterogeneous water bodies. Macrophyte-associated invertebrates and samples of zoobenthos in thickens (in total 37 samples were analyzed) were collected. 68 species of aquatic invertebrates were recorded, including 49 species from Kubenskoe Lake, 41 from Mologa River, and 31 from Vozhe Lake. In the thickets of three macrophyte species, less than a third of all macroinvertebrate richness from the investigated water bodies is recorded. The most abundant species were Endochironomus albipennis Meig., Glyptotendipes gripekoveni Kief., Cricotopus gr. sylvestris. By using cluster analysis, the fauna of all biotopes was divided into macrophyte-associated and bottom-associated. The abundance and biomass of invertebrates in zoophytos in most cases is 3–15 times higher than in zoobenthos. In lakes, species diversity in zoophytos is 1.5–5 times lower than in soil. In the Mologa River the species diversity of zoophytos, on the contrary, is slightly higher. In lakes in the trophic structure, filter-collectors predominate. In the Vozhe Lake a high proportion of predators in the biomass is also recorded. In the Mologa River the trophic structure is more various: along with the collector-filterers, scrapers, shredders and predators are represented. In comparison with research of the 1970s, community structure of macrophyte-associated invertebrates in Vozhe Lake has not practically changed. The dominance of E. albipennis was detected in the Kubenskoe Lake and that was not previously indicated for this reservoir. The species composition and abundance of aquatic macroinvertebrates is determined by the type of substrate (soil or plant), while the structure of communities depends primarily on a type of reservoir, and not on a type of thicket.

Detecting the ecological footprint of selection

The structure of communities is influenced by many processes, both ecological and evolutionary, but these processes are hard to distinguish from available data. The aim of this work is to distinguish the ecological footprint of selection from that of neutral processes that are invariant to species identity. To do this, we build on existing theory to produce a new mechanistic model of community structure incorporating ecology and evolution. We base our work on "massive eco-evolutionary synthesis simulations" (or MESS), which uses information from three biodiversity axes - species richness and abundance; population genetic diversity; and trait variation - to distinguish between processes with a mechanistic model. We added a new form of competition to MESS that explicitly compares the traits of each pair of individuals and allows us to distinguish between inter- and intra-specific competition. We find that this addition is essential to properly detect and characterise selection and it yields different results to the existing simpler model that only compares species' traits to the community mean. Neutral forces receive much less support from systems where trait data is incorporated into the inference mechanism.

You can simply rely on communities for a robust characterization of stances

We show that the structure of communities in social me- dia provides robust information for weakly supervised approaches to assign stances to tweets. Using as seed the SemEval 2016 Stance Detection Task annotated data, we retrieved a high number of topically related tweets. We then propagated information from the manually an- notated seed to the retrieved tweets and thus obtained a bigger training corpus. Classifiers trained with this bigger, weakly supervised dataset reach similar or better performance than those trained with the manually annotated seed. In addition, they are more robust with respect to common manual annotator errors or biases and they have arguably more coverage than smaller datasets. Weakly supervised approaches, most notably self- supervision, commonly suffer from error propagation. Interestingly, communities seem to provide a structure that constrains error propagation. In particular, weakly supervised classifiers that incorporate community struc- ture are more robust with respect to class imbalance. Additionally, this is a straightforward, transparent ap- proach, using standard tools and pipelines, cheaper and faster than methods like crowd sourcing for manual an- notations. Thus it facilitates adoption, interpretability and accountability.

Effects of environmental variables on the composition of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in Amazonian foothills forest

Abiotic factors can negatively or positively affect the structure of communities; studying these factors is important to identify the causes that structure ant communities; taking into account this situation and that in the Amazon foothills region, particularly in the Putumayo department, few studies have been carried out and there is insufficient knowledge about the ecology of many species, this research was aimed to evaluate the effect of environmental variables in the assembly of ants, evaluating the hypothesis: the assembly of forest and grassland ants reflect changes in environmental variables (ambient temperature, soil temperature and relative humidity). In the municipality of Orito, in a secondary forest of the Amazon foothills and its grassland matrix, a 100 m transect was traced, locating 10 stations 10 m apart, in these, ants were sampled with: pitfall traps, corner baits: arboreal, epigeal and hypogeal, leaf litter extraction and manual capture. With the averages of the environmental variables in each station and the diversity and richness data per month of sampling, the Poisson regression analysis was performed and with the data of the morphospecies and the averages of the measured variables, the principal component analysis was performed. The results indicated that, the ants assemblages did not reflect the changes of the variables, some species responded to these patterns. Therefore, to understand the dynamics of the functioning of the ecosystems of the Amazonian foothills, it is necessary to study the biology of each species; However, it was determined that, the habitats studied share generalist species and contain exclusive species that contribute to the diversity of ants in the Amazonian foothills, consequently the sites must be conserved.