Teleost community composition and the role of herbivory on the intertidal reef of a small isolated island in north-west Australia

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (6) ◽  
pp. 684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cindy Bessey ◽  
John K. Keesing ◽  
James McLaughlin ◽  
Max Rees ◽  
Mark Tonks ◽  
...  

Most of the world’s tropical coastal and shelf areas are heavily affected by anthropogenic activities, but the north-west shelf of Australia is considered a ‘very low-impact’ area. The role of herbivory on coral reefs is recognised, but most of that research comes from reefs with considerable land-based impacts. In this study we sampled the teleost community and evaluated herbivory on the reef platform at Browse Island, a small isolated island 200km off north-western Australia, using several approaches: (1) tethering of macroalgae; (2) herbivore exclosures; and (3) video footage. In total, 99 teleost species from 26 families were identified. Turf algal consumption was evident and 18 teleost turf consumers were identified. In contrast, no evidence was found of herbivory on large macroalgae, and browsers, the only group able to consume macroalgae, were represented by just four species all belonging to the genus Naso. The lack of diversity among these specialist herbivores may be a consequence of the small surface area of the reef and the distance to other emergent reefs. Based on a model of top-down control of macroalgae, the reef is potentially vulnerable to disturbance. Small isolated reefs can have low resilience despite having low impacts from land.

Zootaxa ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2044 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAIN DIDIER MISSOUP ◽  
VIOLAINE NICOLAS ◽  
WIM WENDELEN ◽  
CHARLES FELIX BILONG BILONG ◽  
CORINNE CRUAUD ◽  
...  

We used both molecular and craniometrical data to test the presence of Hylomyscus walterverheyeni in the Cameroon Volcanic Line (CVL). Our molecular (cytochrome b and 16S gene sequencing) and morphometrical data (discriminant analyses) clearly show the presence of H. walterverheyeni in the CVL, north-west of the Sanaga River. Hylomyscus walterverheyeni occupies both lowland and mountain forests (up to 2000m asl). In our phylogenetic analyses, the CVL specimens form a monophyletic group. This clade seems to reflect the role of the Sanaga River as a barrier to gene flow within the species.


2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 147-157
Author(s):  
Nadezhda V. Vinyukova

The article examines the views of the Orthodox priest I.I. Fudel on the position and goals of the Orthodox Church in the North-Western region and on the confessional policy of the Russian Empire in that region. The position of father Joseph, who served in Bialystok for several years, correlates with the opinion of major figures in the public debate on that issue – A.A. Vladimirov, I.P. Kornilov, M.N. Katkov, K.N. Leontiev, – and Slavophil idea. Special attention is paid to the polemics of Fudel and Vladimirov in the «Russian review» journal. The author shows that the idea of «our cause» for father Joseph was precisely the Orthodox mission, which, in turn, would have led to natural, voluntary assimilation of local population. Putting the «religious» above the «national» and «governmental», distinguishing the interests, goals and means of the state and the Church, Fudel did not deny the role of the state principles in the establishment of Orthodoxy in the region, which he saw primarily as imperative of government funding of various Church institutions.


Significance In recent months, ISWAP has apparently seized large amounts of military weapons and equipment from the Nigerian military, including heavy armour, and strengthened its control of seized areas. With a raging banditry crisis in the north-west dividing its attention, the army is on the back foot against both ISWAP and the Abubakar Shekau-led Boko Haram faction in the Lake Chad Basin. Impacts ISWAP’s funding will likely remain locally based over the short term, but concerns will grow over increasing international links. Shekau’s Boko Haram faction is less potent currently but remains a serious threat over the short-to-medium term. Minimal reported clashes between ISWAP and Boko Haram fighters indicate both are mainly occupied with attacking military targets for now. Scrutiny will grow over the alleged role of Ansaru, a small group of al-Qaida-linked former Boko Haram fighters, in north-western violence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sadi Maréchal

This article examines how villa baths in the north-western Roman empire can help us understand how rural regions were incorporated in the Roman cultural sphere despite the absence of cities and secondary agglomerations. Whereas in the first phase of Roman rule the addition of private baths to a villa could be interpreted as a marker of a Roman way of life, the ever larger and more luxurious bathhouses of the second and third centuries ad can only be understood in the context of intra-elite competition, revealing a real concern for displaying wealth and underlining social status, but also for leaving a family legacy. Here, a case-study in the rural north-west examines the role of baths in the self-representation of elites, the consolidation of elite peer interaction networks, the creation of social exclusion, and the inclusion of new ideas into local cultures.


2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 181-192
Author(s):  
Anna A. Komzolova

One of the results of the educational reform of the 1860s was the formation of the regular personnel of village teachers. In Vilna educational district the goal was not to invite teachers from central Russia, but to train them on the spot by establishing special seminaries. Trained teachers were supposed to perform the role of «cultural brokers» – the intermediaries between local peasants and the outside world, between the culture of Russian intelligentsia and the culture of the Belarusian people. The article examines how officials and teachers of Vilna educational district saw the role of rural teachers as «cultural brokers» in the context of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the North-Western Provinces. According to them, the graduates of the pedagogical seminaries had to remain within the peasant estate and to keep in touch with their folk «roots». The special «mission» of the village teachers was in promoting the ideas of «Russian elements» and historical proximity to Russia among Belarusian peasants.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Lambert ◽  
A. Penaud ◽  
M. Vidal ◽  
C. Gandini ◽  
L. Labeyrie ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Holocene period (last 11,700 years BP) has been marked by significant climate variability over decadal to millennial timescales. The underlying mechanisms are still being debated, despite ocean–atmosphere–land connections put forward in many paleo-studies. Among the main drivers, involving a cluster of spectral signatures and shaping the climate of north-western Europe, are solar activity, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) varying atmospheric regimes and North Atlantic oceanic gyre dynamics. Over the last 2500 years BP, paleo-environmental signals have been strongly affected by anthropogenic activities through deforestation and land use for crops, grazing, habitations, or access to resources. Palynological proxies (especially pollen grains and marine or freshwater microalgae) help to highlight such anthropogenic imprints over natural variability. Palynological analyses conducted in a macro-estuarine sedimentary environment of north-western France over the last 2500 years BP reveal a huge and atypical 300 year-long arboreal increase between 1700 and 1400 years BP (around 250 and 550 years AD) that we refer to as the ‘1.7–1.4 ka Arboreal Pollen rise event’ or ‘1.7–1.4 ka AP event’. Interestingly, the climatic 1700–1200 years BP interval coincides with evidence for the withdrawal of coastal societies in Brittany (NW France), in an unfavourable socio-economic context. We suggest that subpolar North Atlantic gyre strengthening and related increasing recurrence of storminess extremes may have affected long-term coastal anthropogenic trajectories resulting in a local collapse of coastal agrarian societies, partly forced by climatic degradation at the end of the Roman Period.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-71
Author(s):  
George Hewitt

AbstractProtases ('if'-clauses) in the North West Caucasian language Abkhaz are mostly marked by either /-r/ or /-zα.r/, depending on the tense and/or type of verb (Stative or Dynamic) concerned. The article presents examples of this conditional usage and the role of protasis-type forms in both temporal and interrogative expressions as well as in complementiser-function. The complementisers in question share the semantic feature of irrealis with conditionals. A rhotic element is also found in the non-finite form of the Future I tense, in the Masdar (verbal noun), and in such converbs as the Purposives, the Resultative and the Future Absolute. The article attempts to link the semantic notions of futurity, potentiality, indefiniteness or general irrealis to the rhotic element and asks what might have been the historical development resulting in the forms attested today and thus their original morphological segmentation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 250-266
Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott

This chapter studies cultural invention in light of the North-Western European cultural movement called Enlightenment. Enlightenment refers, in the first place, to a description by European intellectuals of what they took to be an advanced present state of moral and natural knowledge by comparison to that of the ancients. With related self-confidence, in the heyday of their empires, some described their culture as possessed of a dynamic modernity to be distinguished from the ‘oriental' lethargy and backwardness existing elsewhere. Yet Enlightenment also originated as European self-criticism. One context for that was the comparative perspective acquired by discovery of non-European cultures. In this and in other ways the origin of Enlightenment, including its ‘conviction that progress had become unstoppable', lies in the period when Renaissance and Reformation combined with printing and natural philosophy to establish the culture of the European North-West.


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