scholarly journals Divergent Behavior Amid Convergent Evolution: A Case of Four Desert Rodents Learning to Respond to Known and Novel Vipers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonny S. Bleicher ◽  
Burt P. Kotler ◽  
Omri Shalev ◽  
Dixon Austin ◽  
Keren Embar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Perceived Risk ◽  
Convergent Evolution ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kangaroo Rats ◽  
Desert Rodents ◽  
Giving Up Density ◽  
Heteromyid Rodents ◽  
Divergent Behavior ◽  
Cheek Pouches

ABSTRACTDesert communities word-wide are used as natural laboratories for the study of convergent evolution, yet inferences drawn from such studies are necessarily indirect. Here, we brought desert organisms together (rodents and vipers) from two deserts (Mojave and Negev). Both predators and prey in the Mojave have adaptations that give them competitive advantage compared to their middle-eastern counterparts. Heteromyid rodents, kangaroo rats and pocket mice, have fur-lined cheek pouches that allow the rodents to carry larger loads under predation risk compared to gerbilline rodents. Sidewinder rattlesnakes have heat-sensing pits, allowing them to hunt better on moonless nights when their Negev sidewinding counterpart, the Saharan horned vipers, are visually impaired. In behavioral-assays, we used giving-up density (GUD) to gage how each species of rodent perceived risk posed by known and novel snakes. We repeated this for the same set of rodents at first encounter and again two months later following intensive “natural” exposure to both snake species. Pre-exposure, all rodents identified their evolutionarily familiar snake as a greater risk than the novel one. However, post-exposure all identified the heat-sensing sidewinder rattlesnake as a greater risk. The heteromyids were more likely to avoid encounters with, and discern the behavioral difference among, snakes than their gerbilline counterparts.

scholarly journals Divergent behavior amid convergent evolution: A case of four desert rodents learning to respond to known and novel vipers

PLoS ONE ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. e0200672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonny Shlomo Bleicher ◽  
Burt P. Kotler ◽  
Omri Shalev ◽  
Austin Dixon ◽  
Keren Embar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Convergent Evolution ◽  
Desert Rodents ◽  
Divergent Behavior

Patterns of microhabitat use and seed collection within populations of heteromyid rodents

1985 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-330
Author(s):  
Robert T. M'Closkey
Keyword(s):  
Age Groups ◽  
Rodent Species ◽  
Microhabitat Use ◽  
Female Resident ◽  
Seed Collection ◽  
Heteromyid Rodents ◽  
Cheek Pouches ◽  
Number Of Seeds

Microhabitat use and seeds in cheek pouches were examined in four species of heteromyid rodent. Individuals of each species were classified as male or female, resident or transient, and adult or juvenile. The following question is addressed: are there any differences in microhabitat use and seed collection within rodent species and are these differences associated with the sex, residence, or age of individuals? For microhabitats, there were significant differences among individuals for each species analyzed. However, these differences could not be attributed to sex, residence, or age groups within populations. In addition, there were no differences within rodent species in the variety or number of seeds contained in individual cheek pouches. In spite of apparent differences in microhabitat use among heteromyid species, individual rodents are extremely variable in their use of microhabitats.

The Role of Predation in Shaping the Behavior, Morphology and Community Organization of Desert Rodents

1994 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 449 ◽  
Author(s):  
BP Kotler ◽  
JS Brown ◽  
WA Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Great Basin ◽  
Foraging Behaviour ◽  
Species Coexistence ◽  
Community Organization ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Bipedal Locomotion ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Community Processes ◽  
Desert Rodents ◽  
Risk Of Predation

Predation greatly influences many aspects of the ecology of desert rodents, from foraging behaviour to mechanisms of species coexistence to the evolution of specialised morphologies. Using a foraging-theory approach, we examine consequences of predation for assemblages of desert rodents from North America and the Middle East. In particular, we review experimental evidence that examines the influence of predation on foraging costs and foraging behaviour, explore how predation can act to structure communities, and discuss the role that predation may have played in the evolution of bipedal locomotion. Finally, we compare the importance of predation for the evolution of anti-predator behaviours and morphology, for population dynamics, and for community processes, with its magnitude and heterogeneity. In regard to foraging behaviour, desert rodents treat the risk of predation as a cost of foraging. They combine assessments of food and safety to arrive at foraging decisions, exploiting resource patches less intensively in response to increased predatory risk. The cost of predation can be up to 91% of the foraging costs of desert rodents, but the proportion is greater for Middle Eastern rodents than for North American rodents. In regard to community structure, predation can provide the niche axis as well as the necessary tradeoff for species coexistence. Despite the importance of predation in shaping the foraging behaviour of desert rodents, predation may not always influence species coexistence. Predation contributes to species coexistence at sites in the Sonoran and Great Basin deserts. But in the Negev Desert, where predation costs are the greatest, predation does not provide a mechanism of species coexistence. In regard to bipedal locomotion, predation most likely confers superior ability to avoid predators by improving sprint speed and ability to take evasive action, but at the expense of foraging ability in safe microhabitats. The evolution of bipedality will be favoured by situations where the risk of predation is great: the open microhabitat is riskier than the bush, the richest patches are found in the riskiest places, and rich patches are far apart. The magnitude of predatory risk will affect the evolution of anti-predator behaviour and morphologies. However, the importance of predation in community processes is not determined by its magnitude, but by its heterogeneity in time and space relative to the abilities of potentially coexisting species.

Foraging Response to Risks of Predation and Competition in Artificial Pools

2010 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Stav ◽  
Burt P. Kotler ◽  
Leon Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
Perceived Risk ◽  
Foraging Activity ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Similar Tendency ◽  
Green Toad ◽  
Risk Of Predation ◽  
Giving Up Density ◽  
Culiseta Longiareolata ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Resource Patches

Although ecologists have learned much about the influence of competitors and perceived risk of predation on foraging in terrestrial systems by measuring giving-up density (GUD, the amount of food left behind in a resource patch following exploitation), GUDs have rarely been used in aquatic environments. Here we use foraging activity (proportion foraging) and GUDs to assess the effects that two periphyton consumers and potential competitors, green toad (Bufo viridis) tadpoles and mosquito (Culiseta longiareolata) larvae, have on each other. We also examine the effects of perceived risk of predation imposed by a dragonfly nymph (Anax imperator). To do so, we conducted an artificial pool experiment and developed a food patch appropriate for measuring GUDs for periphyton grazers. MoreCulisetaindividuals foraged in rich food patches than in poor patches.Bufoshowed a similar tendency. FewerBufoforaged in both patch types in the presence of cagedAnax. Culisetashowed a similar tendency. However, in the rich patches, onlyBuforeduced foraging activity when the caged predator was present. BothBufoandCulisetadepleted food patches through exploitation, resulting in lower GUDs. Both competitors together resulted in lower GUDs than did food depletion of each species alone. However, the presence of cagedAnaxhad little or no effects on GUDs. Overall, bothBufoandCulisetarespond to food and safety. They are able to direct foraging effort to richer patches and devote more time to those patches, and they respond to predation risk by choosing whether or not to exploit resource patches.

scholarly journals The Concept of ‘Home’ in Palestinian Diaspora Fiction: A Critical Study of Randa Jarrar’s Fiction

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Jameel Ahmed Alghaberi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Creative Space ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

The paper discusses the concepts of ‘home’, ‘cultural identity’, and ‘transnationalism’ in Randa Jarrar’s fiction. Being a diasporic Palestinian American, Randa Jarrar in her debut novel A Map of Home presents a particular view of ‘homeland’ and of what ‘historic Palestine’ means to her. The attempt in this paper is to critically analyze her fiction and to highlight the issues that she tackles as a writer of Palestinian origin. The paper also explores the way Randa Jarrar approaches the concept of ‘home’, and an examination of the relationship between Palestinian diasporas and their homeland-Palestine is presented. There is much wandering that Randa Jarrar is experimenting with in rather a creative space, and there is also a counter-narrative ideology embedded in the novel, a way to resist the stereotypes that have fixed the Middle Eastern female body as propagated in Orientalist discourse. 

Specters of World Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karim Mattar
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World Systems Theory ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Local Literature ◽  
Local Literatures ◽  
Stage Play ◽  
Classical Arabic

This book draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida, and world-systems theory to address the institutionalized construct of “world literature” from its origins in Goethe and Marx to the present day.  It argues that through its history, this construct has served to incorporate if not annul local literatures and the concept of “local literature” itself, and to universalize the novel, the lyric poem, and the stage play as the only literary forms appropriate to modernity.  It demonstrates this thesis through a comparative reading of the reinscription of the classical Arabic-Islamic concept of “adab” as “literature” in the modern, European sense in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran in the 19th to mid-20th centuries.  It then turns to the Middle Eastern novel in the global contexts of its production, translation, circulation, and reception today.  Through new readings of novels and other literary works by Abdelrahman Munif, Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi, Yasmin Crowther, and Marjane Satrapi, and with reference to landmarks of Middle Eastern and world literary history ranging from the Mu‘allaqāt and Alf Layla wa Layla to Don Quixote, it argues that these texts—like “world literature” itself—are constitutively haunted by specters of the literary forms and traditions, of the life-worlds that they expressed, cast aside by modernity.  In the case of the Middle Eastern novel, it is adab and all that it encompassed in the classical Arab-Islamic world that is suppressed or othered, but that spectral, yet returns in new, genuinely worldly constellations of form.

scholarly journals For the love of modernity: adventures of the novel or trails of the genre in the second half of the 19th centuryModernite aşkına: Türkçe romanın sergüzeşti yahut XIX. yüzyılın ikinci yarısında türün izini sürmek

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 231
Author(s):  
İrfan Karakoç
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Full Text ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
English Summary ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
New Literature ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Relationship

During the second half of the 19th century, while the Ottoman press, publishing and literary platforms were flourishing, a need for a more “practical” language of writing arose to convey ideas, and there was a great need to have a new, a more practical language while writing. A language that can convey an idea, a language that can produce information, and a writing style that can spread both. This need for a new language is emphasized by the prominent figures of “New Literature”, and to these writers and prominent figures in the Ottoman state novel as a genre seemed promising for the modernization of Ottoman society as a whole.This article is focusing on the novel’s function during the second half of the 19th century. At the centre of the matter is the reaction of Ottoman –Turkish intelligentsia to the new genre. The article is trying to depict the relationship between classical forms and the new genre and how writers were motivated to merge and create a local novel genre. While doing that we will be mentioning why and how this new genre made local by the names, such as sergüzeşt and hikaye and it’s communication with the “acaib u garaib – supernatural stories” of the Middle Eastern classical literature.Extended English summary is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file. ÖzetOsmanlı basın ve edebiyat ortamının 1850’lerden sonra hareketlenmeye başlamasının da etkisiyle, edebiyatın fikri, düşünceyi ifade edebilecek, bilgi üretecek ve onu yayacak bir “yazı dili”ne ihtiyacı açık bir şekilde anlaşılmıştır. Bu ihtiyaç, “yeni edebiyat”ın önemli temsilcileri ve modernleşmeye çalışan devletin yöneticileri tarafından da sıklıkla vurgulanmıştır. İşte bu yönetici/yazarlar, modernleşmek için ihtiyaç duydukları bu yeni dili, çok yönlü bir şekilde kullanabilecekleri bir araç olan romanla kurabileceklerini fark etmişlerdir.Türün XIX. yüzyılın ikinci yarısındaki serüvenine odaklanan bu çalışmada, işte bu yazı dilinin Osmanlı-Türk edebiyatında yazar, okur, matbuat yani edebiyat kamusu tarafından nasıl algılandığı üzerinde düşünülecektir. Makalede, doğayı, insanı, toplumu anlatan romanın, Osmanlı edebiyatına girişine kadar dolaşımda olan hikâye etme pratikleriyle olan ilişkisi de göz önünde bulundurulacaktır. Ayrıca, bu ilişkinin edebiyat tarihi araştırmalarında yorumlanma tarzı, türe gösterilen davranış kalıpları Osmanlı-Türkiye modernleşme refleksleri üzerinden tartışılacaktır. Bu bağlamda türün sergüzeşt, hikâye kelimeleriyle yerelleştirilmesi, ahlâkı temel alan bir yapıyla yazılması ve Ortadoğu klasik edebiyatlarında görülen “acâib ü gâraib” anlatılarıyla bağlantısı tartışılacaktır.

scholarly journals Rebellion in a World of Totalitarianism Sharīf Ḥatātah’s Novel "The Eye with an Iron Lid"

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 179-197
Author(s):  
Geula Elimelekh
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
The Novel ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Prison Literature ◽  
The People ◽  
Egyptian Literature

Political freedom in the Arab world and rebellion against it underpin the novel al-ʿAyn dhāt al-jafn al-maʿdanī (The Eye with an Iron Lid, 1980) by Egyptian author Sharīf Ḥatātah (1923– ). This novel set in 1940s Egypt, a decade of national and social ferment, harshly criticizes British colonialism and the Egyptian governments of the time. The narrative depicts the struggle of the Egyptian national movement as well as the brutal denial of political and individual freedoms that led to the July 1952 revolution. The novel is profoundly autobiographical, and Ḥatātah’s life story as a doctor, writer and political activist depicted in his al-Nawāfidh al-maftūḥah (The Open Windows, 2006) contributesvaluable background. A wide-ranging analysis of the author and his novel embraces comparative literature, especially within the Arabic prison literature genre, recent critical studies, the existentialphilosophy of Albert Camus and the psychological elements of fear of death, loneliness and persecution. At its root the article spotlights the adage, the people’s fear of the leadership and the leadership’s fear of the people, that drives so much of contemporary Middle Eastern conflict and oppression.Keywords: Sharīf Ḥatātah, The Eye with an Iron Lid, Arabic prison literature, Egyptian literature, ModernEgyptian history, totalitarianism

scholarly journals Awareness and perception of COVID-19 among the general population: A Middle Eastern survey

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0250461
Author(s):  
Ruba M. Jaber ◽  
Baraa Mafrachi ◽  
Abdallah Al-Ani ◽  
Mustafa Shkara
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Information Source ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cross Sectional Survey ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Two Populations

Due to the sudden emergence of the novel coronavirus as a worldwide pandemic, this study aimed to evaluate the awareness and practices of both the Jordanian and Iraqi populations during the early stages of the pandemic. A cross-sectional survey was conducted between the 19th and 22nd of March to assess the public’s awareness toward COVID-19. Multiple scored domains were used to assess the differences between the two populations. Statistical analysis was conducted to reveal the influence of sociodemographic variables on these scores. A total of 3167 participants were recruited in the study, of which, 1599 (50.5%) were from Jordan and 1568 (49.5%) were from Iraq. More than half of the Jordanian (56.8%) and Iraqi participants (53.2%) showed average or adequate awareness about COVID-19. More than 60% of both populations relied on medical staff for COVID-19 related information. Social media was the second most common COVID-19 information source, as it was reported by 53.7% of Jordanian participants and 62.8% of Iraqi participants. More than 90% of both populations participated in precautionary measurements. Finally, about 20% of both populations failed to recognize droplet inhalation as a source of transmission. Despite the portrayed awareness levels, governmental involvement is warranted to increase the public’s awareness and fill the gaps within their knowledge.

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