The threatened Rufous Limestone Babbler Gypsophila calcicola—not a quarry species, but a “quarried species”

Summary Limestone karst habitats are threatened globally by quarrying for production of concrete and cement. A significant area of limestone karst shared among the provinces of Saraburi, Lopburi and Nakhon Ratchasima in Thailand encompasses the entire global range of a threatened bird taxon, the Rufous Limestone Babbler Gypsophila calcicola. We estimate that 10% of the suitable habitat for this species had already been lost to quarrying by 2020, and the extension of already proposed concessions could increase this to one-quarter, with the total area impacted by proposed future quarrying as great as 273 km2, or one and a half times greater than the entire area thought to support the species, within a few years. Only 2.66 km2 (1.4% of the species’ range) has received formal habitat protection as national park. We propose further surveys of the babbler be incorporated as part of a wider biotic survey of the Saraburi Group Limestones, leading to the development of an integrated management and zoning plan that takes account of the distributional knowledge of other threatened endemic taxa of this region.

Marine free-living nematodes in semiarid inland waters

Aim This study reports the occurrence of five Nematoda genera previously considered as exclusively marine in inland waters. Methods Sediment samples were taken, weekly, during nine weeks, at a small spring at the Horto Florestal Olho D’Água da Bica, Cuité, PB, ca. 130 km away from the shoreline, between March and May 2016 and fixed in 4% formalin. Nematodes were sorted by manual elutriation through sieves with 0.5 and 0.045 mm and slides were prepared. Results The sediment was classified as coarse sand, with organic matter content ranging between 2.73 and 13.32%, temperature between 27-28°C and constant salinity of 6. From 315 nematodes were sampled among which 18 were from five genera previously thought to be exclusively marine were found. Bolbolaimus was the most common, found in 11.1% of the samples, followed by Gomphionema (3.7%), Rynchonema (7.4%), Prorynchonema (7.4%) e Sabatieria (3.7%), representing 5.7% from total of nematofauna. These genera are widely distributed worldwide, but had never been recorded from inland environments. Conclusions This study contributes with the distributional knowledge of free-living nematodes. From literature data, these genera are not restricted by low salinity, and can be found in estuarine and/or brackish water environments and body water with direct connection to the sea. In any case, the presence of marine genera in this region which is >130 km away from the nearest shoreline is noteworthy, highlighting the importance of studying nematodes from these poorly known semiarid water bodies. These new occurrences raise questionings about the dispersal mechanisms that certified the colonization of these nematodes in the semiarid.

Linguistic Distributional Knowledge and Sensorimotor Grounding both Contribute to Semantic Category Production

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre-registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories, and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11-dimensional representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co-occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow-up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing, and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/.

New records of Platynectes (s. str.) diving beetles from South America with description of two new species (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae: Agabinae)

Diving beetles in the genus Platynectes (s. str.) in South America are relatively large and charismatically colored, yet relatively rare in museum collections. Recent fieldwork in northern and central South America has resulted in the collection of hundreds of new specimens that substantially expand our distributional knowledge of the genus. Here, we provide new distributional records for Platynectes decemnotatus (Aubé, 1838), P. garciai Gustafson, Short & Miller, 2016, P. submaculatus (Laporte, 1835), and P. tafelbergensis Gustafson, Short & Miller, 2016. In addition, two new species were identified and described herein: Platynectes bicolor sp. nov. of the P. ornatifrons species group from Brazil (Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul), and P. colombicus sp. nov. of the P. submaculatus species group from the Guiana Shield region of eastern Colombia. These new records suggest that Platynectes (s. str.) is likely widespread across the Brazilian and Guiana Shield regions of the continent, and that some individual species have substantial range sizes of nearly 2000 km. An updated key to the species groups of Neotropical Platynectes (s. str.) and to the species of P. submaculatus species group are provided.

Morphological awareness in L2 Spanish: What is learned incidentally and what requires explicit teaching?

The development of morphological awareness positively impacts vocabulary learning, inferencing skills or reading comprehension. However, it is currently given very little attention in Spanish as a Second Language textbooks, due to the prevailing belief that derivational morphological knowledge can be developed without any explicit teaching. This idea has been repeatedly contested in the literature, and the present study aims to add to this ongoing discussion by specifying the aspects of morphological knowledge that would benefit the most from explicit pedagogical treatment. Four tasks were designed, which tapped into relational and distributional knowledge, both at the receptive and productive level. Students enrolled in three successive SSL course levels completed the tasks, as did one group of beginners who completed them twice: before and after a four-session long morphological training. Results indicate that participating in that training was advantageous in most tasks, but particularly so for the one that required distributional productive skills. Pedagogical implications of these results are further discussed.

An assessment of vouchered records and field observations of the rare anguid, Dopasia buettikoferi (Lidth de Jeude, 1905) in Borneo

We report recent observations, two new locality records and an updated overview of the distribution of Dopasia buettikoferi (Lidth de Jeude, 1905) from Borneo, as well as photographic documentation of this species showing colouration and patterns in living individuals and the holotype. This note represents the first complete compilation of distributional knowledge of this rarely-encountered member of the family Anguidae.

Non‐Clairvoyant Dynamic Mechanism Design

We introduce a new family of dynamic mechanisms that restricts sellers from using future distributional knowledge. Since the allocation and pricing of each auction period do not depend on the type distributions of future periods, we call this family of dynamic mechanisms non‐clairvoyant. We develop a framework (bank account mechanisms) for characterizing, designing, and proving lower bounds for dynamic mechanisms (clairvoyant or non‐clairvoyant). We use the same methods to compare the revenue extraction power of clairvoyant and non‐clairvoyant dynamic mechanisms.