Number of instars and sexual dimorphism of Tetropium fuscum (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) larvae determined by maximum likelihood

2012 ◽  
Vol 144 (5) ◽  
pp. 720-726 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Flaherty ◽  
Jacques Régnière ◽  
Jon Sweeney

AbstractTetropium fuscum (Fabricius) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) is a Palaearctic wood borer that has been established in Atlantic Canada since at least 1990. Neither the number of instars nor methods for determining the instar of field-collected larvae have been documented for this species. Head-capsule width was measured for 949 T. fuscum larvae in order to determine the number of instars in this species, estimate the mean and variance of head-capsule widths associated with each instar, and identify whether head-capsule width is sexually dimorphic. Head-capsule width data were analysed using maximum likelihood analysis of mixture models and the Brooks–Dyar rule. Our results provide strong support for the existence of six larval instars, with sexually dimorphic head-capsule widths in instars five and six. The probability of misclassifying larvae into instar-specific and sex-specific categories ranged from 0.6% to 12.8%, with the highest probabilities occurring when assigning a sex to fifth-instar and sixth-instar larvae.

Author(s):  
Olubiyi O. A.

This study was carried out to estimate the dissolution time of some antiseptic soaps . The lifetime behavior of the antiseptic soaps was also modeled in order to estimate some basic measures and compare their lifetimes. In the analysis of data, the weibull distribution of 3-parameter case was used. The method of maximum likelihood estimator was used in estimating the parameters. The mean and variance time to failure, reliability, Weibull conditional reliability and Weibull reliable life of the products were obtained.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Adebayo Ojo ◽  
Adebayo Amos Omoloye

The maize weevil,Sitophilus zeamaisMotschulsky (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), is one of the most destructive pests of stored cereals. Knowledge of the life history and biology is important to the development of an integrated pest management program. Investigation was carried out on developmental biology ofS. zeamaison four main cereal crops, maize, rice, sorghum, and millet, under laboratory conditions. Egg incubation, oviposition periods, and larval instar development were not different significantly among the food hosts. Number of eggs laid varied significantly among the cereal grains; mean fecundity was highest on maize (67.2±3.16) and lowest on millet (53.8±0.17). Number of immature (larva and pupa) and adult stages varied significantly among the cereal grains. There exist four larval instars with a varied mean head capsule width, with a mean total instar larval developmental period of 23.1, 22.2, 22.2, and 21.6 d on maize, rice, sorghum, and millet, respectively. There was linear relationship and significant correlation between the stages of larval development and head capsule width. The mean developmental period from egg to adult varied, being highest on maize (34.7 d) and lowest on sorghum (33.5 d).


Genetics ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 154 (3) ◽  
pp. 1193-1201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D Keightley ◽  
Thomas M Bataillon

AbstractWe develop a maximum-likelihood (ML) approach to estimate genomic mutation rates (U) and average homozygous mutation effects (s) from mutation-accumulation (MA) experiments in which phenotypic assays are carried out in several generations. We use simulations to compare the procedure's performance with the method of moments traditionally used to analyze MA data. Similar precision is obtained if mutation effects are small relative to the environmental standard deviation, but ML can give estimates of mutation parameters that have lower sampling variances than those obtained by the method of moments if mutations with large effects have accumulated. The inclusion of data from intermediate generations may improve the precision. We analyze life-history trait data from two Caenorhabditis elegans MA experiments. Under a model with equal mutation effects, the two experiments provide similar estimates for U of ~0.005 per haploid, averaged over traits. Estimates of s are more divergent and average at −0.51 and −0.13 in the two studies. Detailed analysis shows that changes of mean and variance of genetic values of MA lines in both C. elegans experiments are dominated by mutations with large effects, but the analysis does not rule out the presence of a large class of deleterious mutations with very small effects.


Author(s):  
Hung Phuoc Truong ◽  
Thanh Phuong Nguyen ◽  
Yong-Guk Kim

AbstractWe present a novel framework for efficient and robust facial feature representation based upon Local Binary Pattern (LBP), called Weighted Statistical Binary Pattern, wherein the descriptors utilize the straight-line topology along with different directions. The input image is initially divided into mean and variance moments. A new variance moment, which contains distinctive facial features, is prepared by extracting root k-th. Then, when Sign and Magnitude components along four different directions using the mean moment are constructed, a weighting approach according to the new variance is applied to each component. Finally, the weighted histograms of Sign and Magnitude components are concatenated to build a novel histogram of Complementary LBP along with different directions. A comprehensive evaluation using six public face datasets suggests that the present framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves 98.51% for ORL, 98.72% for YALE, 98.83% for Caltech, 99.52% for AR, 94.78% for FERET, and 99.07% for KDEF in terms of accuracy, respectively. The influence of color spaces and the issue of degraded images are also analyzed with our descriptors. Such a result with theoretical underpinning confirms that our descriptors are robust against noise, illumination variation, diverse facial expressions, and head poses.


Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 568
Author(s):  
Sabine G. Gebhardt-Henrich ◽  
Ariane Stratmann ◽  
Marian Stamp Dawkins

Group level measures of welfare flocks have been criticized on the grounds that they give only average measures and overlook the welfare of individual animals. However, we here show that the group-level optical flow patterns made by broiler flocks can be used to deliver information not just about the flock averages but also about the proportion of individuals in different movement categories. Mean optical flow provides information about the average movement of the whole flock while the variance, skew and kurtosis quantify the variation between individuals. We correlated flock optical flow patterns with the behavior and welfare of a sample of 16 birds per flock in two runway tests and a water (latency-to-lie) test. In the runway tests, there was a positive correlation between the average time taken to complete the runway and the skew and kurtosis of optical flow on day 28 of flock life (on average slow individuals came from flocks with a high skew and kurtosis). In the water test, there was a positive correlation between the average length of time the birds remained standing and the mean and variance of flock optical flow (on average, the most mobile individuals came from flocks with the highest mean). Patterns at the flock level thus contain valuable information about the activity of different proportions of the individuals within a flock.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 955
Author(s):  
Alamir Elsayed ◽  
Mohamed El-Beltagy ◽  
Amnah Al-Juhani ◽  
Shorooq Al-Qahtani

The point kinetic model is a system of differential equations that enables analysis of reactor dynamics without the need to solve coupled space-time system of partial differential equations (PDEs). The random variations, especially during the startup and shutdown, may become severe and hence should be accounted for in the reactor model. There are two well-known stochastic models for the point reactor that can be used to estimate the mean and variance of the neutron and precursor populations. In this paper, we reintroduce a new stochastic model for the point reactor, which we named the Langevin point kinetic model (LPK). The new LPK model combines the advantages, accuracy, and efficiency of the available models. The derivation of the LPK model is outlined in detail, and many test cases are analyzed to investigate the new model compared with the results in the literature.


1991 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-538
Author(s):  
M. P. Quine

Points arrive in succession on an interval and immediately ‘cover' a region of length ½ to each side (less if they are close to the boundary or to a covered part). The location of a new point is uniformly distributed on the uncovered parts. We study the mean and variance of the total number of points ever formed, in particular as a → 0, in which case we also establish asymptotic normality.


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