佛坪三官庙地区大熊猫种群数量的DNA指纹分析

应用同位素标记大熊猫基因指纹探针Ｆ２ＺＧＰ９６０６０８０１，以秦岭南坡中段佛坪国家级大熊猫自然保护区三官庙范围内采集的大熊猫粪便样品作材料，进行了ＤＮＡ指纹检测．（１）在相同或不同时间、领域采得的粪便样品，显现出相同或不同的ＤＮＡ指纹图谱，达到个体认定的目的，进一步表明了大熊猫的尽量新鲜的粪便，可以作为ＤＮＡ指纹分析材料，进行野生种群数量调查．（２）根据检测２１个粪便样品的结果，无误地认定了三官庙地区有１３只大熊猫个体．其中有３个家系．（３）大熊猫粪便样品的ＤＮＡ指纹图，通过微机识别的个体数，准确可靠，能获得大熊猫在野外的真实个体数量．     

Weaning in the guinea pig (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cavia aperea</Emphasis> f. <Emphasis Type="Italic">porcellus</Emphasis>): Who decides and by what measure?

Offspring should be selected to influence maternal effort to maximize their own fitness, whereas mothers are selected to limit investment in present progeny. In mammals, this leads to a conflict over the amount of milk provided and the timing of weaning. The intensity and time course of such conflict has so far mostly been investigated experimentally in altricial rodents. However, it is expected that offspring options for conflict will depend on developmental state. We therefore investigated in the highly precocial domestic guinea pig (Cavia aperea f. porcellus) who decides over nursing performance and weaning and how pup state influences these decisions. Specifically, we tested whether a threshold mass of pups predicts weaning time. By exchanging older litters against neonates and vice versa, we produced a situation in which females differed in lactational stage from the cross-fostered pups. Our results indicate that females decide about the timing of weaning, as cross-fostered younger pups were weaned at a much younger age than controls and older pups benefited from continuing lactation of foster mothers. Growth rates did not differ in the treatment groups, and different weaning ages resulted in differing weaning mass refuting the hypothesis that weaning is based on a threshold mass of offspring. This constitutes clear evidence that in a precocial rodent, the guinea pig, decisions about maternal care are primarily determined by maternal state and little influenced by pup state despite the extreme precociality of offspring. We suggest that precocial pups show little resistance to early weaning when food is abundant, as they reach sufficient nutritional independence by the middle of lactation to enable independent survival.     

Is big the best? Queen size,usurpation and nest closure in a primitively eusocial sweat bee (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Lasioglossum malachurum</Emphasis>)

For primitively eusocial insects in which a single foundress establishes a nest at the start of the colony cycle, the solitary provisioning phase before first worker emergence represents a risky period when other, nestless foundresses may attempt to usurp the nest. In the primitively eusocial sweat bee Lasioglossum malachurum (Hymenoptera, Halictidae), spring foundresses compete for nests which are dug into hard soil. Nest-searching foundresses (‘floaters’) frequently inspected nests during this solitary phase and thereby exerted a usurpation pressure on resident queens. Usurpation has been hypothesised to increase across the solitary provisioning phase and favour closure of nests at an aggregation, marking the termination of the solitary provisioning phase by foundresses, before worker emergence. However, our experimental and observational data suggest that usurpation pressure may remain constant or even decrease across the solitary provisioning phase and therefore cannot explain nest closure before first worker emergence. Levels of aggression during encounters between residents and floaters were surprisingly low (9% of encounters across 2 years), and the outcome of confrontations was in favour of residents (resident maintains residency in 94% of encounters across 2 years). Residents were significantly larger than floaters. However, the relationship between queen size and offspring production, though positive, was not statistically significant. Size therefore seems to confer a considerable advantage to a queen during the solitary provisioning phase in terms of nest residency, but its importance in terms of worker production appears marginal. Factors other than intraspecific usurpation need to be invoked to explain the break in provisioning activity of a foundress before first worker emergence.     

减灾与山东经济发展

山东是中国沿海对外开放的主要省份之一，预计在２１世纪太平洋时代中占有重要的地位，在迈向２１世纪中，面临着发展与减灾协调的抉择。山东地处西太平洋沿岸，不仅灾害种类多，分布广，范围大，灾害重，而且各类灾害具有频繁性、连发性、衍生性等特征，各类灾害目前正步入异常活跃的新时期，灾害对今后区域发展构成了严重威胁。实行减灾与发展协调，是山东迈向太平洋世纪的可行选择。本文在分析世界经济发展给山东带来的机遇、山东减灾与发展的关系、山东灾害特征、规律及趋势的基础上，提出了山东减灾与发展的大框架构思，包括减灾与发展战略目标、指导方针和原则、战略重点及对策建议。     

膜-生物反应器混合液性质对膜污染影响的研究进展

膜-生物反应器作为一种新型的污水处理和回用技术,近年来在基础研究和实际应用领域都得到广泛关注,但是影响其长期稳定运行的膜污染问题却一直没有得到深入研究和解决.混合液特性是影响膜污染控制的重要因素,从混合液理化性质(组成、功能、结构和环境因素)和生物学性质(微生物群落结构、微生物功能特征)2个方面进行介绍,综述了目前关于混合液性质与膜污染关系的研究现状.目前的研究虽然取得一定进展,但在相关性分析、群落特征与膜污染关系、污染层形成机理等方面仍存在许多不足.     

Strategies of maintaining the natural purification potential of rivers and lakes

Surface waters have a great impact on ecology and life of man. Because of their current use and exploitation, chemical and biological pollution, as well as physical changes of rivers and lakes are common. Natural self-purification potential helps to compensate harms to a certain degree. Proposals are given to detect restrictions of the purification potential in time as well as to support and to enhance the natural purification potential.     

Artificial indoor streams as a method to investigate the impact of chemicals on lotic communities

The potential hazard of chemicals on aquatic communities are generally evaluated by standardised single-species bioassays. Safety assessment is based on results gained from organisms adapted to lentic systems and biological interactions in ecosystems are neglected. While lotic communities are often at first in contact with chemicals, it is astonishing that microcosms with lentic communities are mainly used as a bridge between laboratory bioassays and outdoor aquatic systems. Hence, we established five artificial indoor streams to simulate abiotic factors of small rivers. The closed-circuit system was filled with nutrients added to tap water. Washed pebbles were used as sediment. The dynamics of a simple biocoenoses consisting of aufwuchs, Lumbriculus variegatus Asellus aquaticus and Gammarus fossarum was investigated. The dynamic of aufwuchs and periphyton was determined as dry weight and chlorophyll-a, respectively and qualitatively by pigment pattern. The abundance of different developmental stages of L. variegatus was determined at the end of the experiment as well as the population dynamics of G. fossarum and A. aquaticus. Survival rates of gammarids and juveniles per female were investigated and data were used for modelling the population dynamics. The experiment was carried out to investigate the performance of the established artificial streams and the developed approaches to investigate effects of chemicals on a basic lotic community. The prime reason to establish this approach was to close a gap between complex artificial stream systems and laboratory single species tests to assess the impact of chemicals on the aquatic environment.     

Strategic investment in reputation

Although collective efforts are common in both animal and human societies, many human and probably animal social dilemmas have no obvious cooperative solution, which is a challenge for evolutionary biologists. In public goods games, i.e. the experimental paradigm for studying the sustainability of a public resource with human subjects, initial cooperation usually declines quickly. Recently, it has been shown that the interaction with another social game in which good reputation attracts help, can maintain a high level of cooperation in the public goods game. Here we show experimentally that humans use different strategies in the public goods game conditional on whether the player knows that his decisions will be either known or unknown in another social game. The knowledge of being recognized as the same individual in both scenarios motivates players to invest in their reputation and thus sustain the public resource. However, cooperation declines immediately when individual identities switch from being recognizable to being unrecognizable between the two interacting games.Communicated by M. Borgerhoff-Mulder     

Utility of Dynamic-Landscape Metapopulation Models for Sustainable Forest Management

Abstract:  We evaluated the utility of combining metapopulation models with landscape-level forest-dynamics models to assess the sustainability of forest management practices. We used the Brown Creeper ( Certhia americana ) in the boreal forests of northern Ontario as a case study. We selected the Brown Creeper as a potential indicator of sustainability because it is relatively common in the region but is dependent on snags and old trees for nesting and foraging; hence, it may be sensitive to timber harvesting. For the modeling we used RAMAS Landscape, a software package that integrates RAMAS GIS, population-modeling software, and LANDIS, forest-dynamics modeling software. Predictions about the future floristic composition and structure of the landscape under a variety of management and natural disturbance scenarios were derived using LANDIS. We modeled eight alternative forest management scenarios, ranging in intensity from no timber harvesting and a natural fire regime to intensive timber harvesting with salvage logging after fire. We predicted the response of the Brown Creeper metapopulation over a 160-year period and used future population size and expected minimum population size to compare the sustainability of the various management scenarios. The modeling methods were easy to apply and model predictions were sensitive to the differences among management scenarios, indicating that these methods may be useful for assessing and ranking the sustainability of forest management options. Primary concerns about the method are the practical difficulties associated with incorporating fire stochasticity in prediction uncertainty and the number of model assumptions that must be made and tested with sensitivity analysis. We wrote new software to help quantify the contribution of landscape stochasticity to model prediction uncertainty.