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Supplementary Tables: Blackfin Sucker Mensural and Locality Data
No full textA new genus is being described for the Blackfin Sucker and the mensural data and the locality information used to construct the description is included here. The mensural data includes counts and measurements for specimens housed at the Auburn University Museum of Natural History. The locality information was largely culled from GBIF.org: GBIF.org (2023) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.96aukf. Accessed 13 December 2023.In pressYe
Review of Ilana M. Bumberg's George Eliot: Whole Soul
No full textArticle from the George Eliot Review. Digitized and hosted by the George Eliot Review Online, editor Beverley Park Rilett.Publishe
The Personal Touch: A Qualitative Dive into the Knowledge Networks of Librarian
Full text linkGoal: This work-in-progress conference presentation seeks to understand how librarians share knowledge and activate their social networks to solve job-related problems. Cross and Parker’s (2004) latent network view of access and awareness challenges serves as the foundation for surfacing both barriers and coping strategies.
Methodology: Five open-ended responses were collected as part of an online survey of 280 professional librarians in 2019. Inductive coding is being used to identify and categorize lower-level concepts into overarching themes and a cohesive storyline (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Data will be queried to identify themes that may be more relevant for individuals sharing certain demographic attributes (i.e., gender, ethnicity, age).
Results: Findings will be submitted to a top library science journal in 2025 and communicated via narrative description, diagram, and cross-tabulation
Wasted Efforts Impair Random Search Efficiency and Reduce Choosiness in Mate-Pairing Termites
Full text linkRandom search theories predict that animals employ movement patterns that optimize encounter rates with target resources.
However, animals are not always able to achieve the best search strategy. Energy depletion, for example, limits searchers’ movement activities, forcing them to adjust their behaviors before and after encounters. Here, we investigate the cost of mate search in a termite, Reticulitermes speratus, and reveal that the costs associated with mate finding reduce the selectivity of mating partners.After a dispersal flight, termites search for a mating partner with limited reserved energy. We found that their movement activity and diffusiveness progressively declined over extendedmate search.Our data-based simulations qualitatively confirmed that the reduced movement diffusiveness decreased the searching efficiency. Also, prolonged search periods reduced survival rate and the number of offspring. Thus,mate search has two different negative effects on termites. Finally, we found that termites with an extended mate search reduced the selectivity of mating partners, where males immediately paired with any encountering females. Thus, termites dramatically changed their mate search behavior depending on their internal states. Our finding highlights that accounting for the searchers’ internal states is essential to fill the gap between random search theories and empirical behavioral observations.PublishedYe
From heterosis to outbreeding depression: genotype-by-environment interaction shifts hybrid fitness in opposite directions
No full textIn F1 hybrids, phenotypic values are expected to be near the parental means under additive effects or close to one parent under dominance. However, F1 traits can fall outside the parental range, and outbreeding depression occurs when inferior fitness is observed in hybrids. Another possible outcome is heterosis, a phenomenon that interspecific hybrids or intraspecific crossbred F1s exhibit improved fitness compared to both parental species or strains. As an application of heterosis, hybrids between channel catfish females and blue catfish males are superior in feed conversion efficiency, carcass yield, and harvestability. Over twenty years of hybrid catfish production in experimental settings and farming practices generated abundant phenotypic data, making it an ideal system to investigate heterosis. In this study, we characterized fitness in terms of growth and survival longitudinally, revealing environment-dependent heterosis. In ponds, hybrids outgrow both parents due to an extra rapid growth phase of 2~4 months in year 2. This bimodal growth pattern is unique to F1 hybrids in pond culture environment only. In sharp contrast, the same genetic types cultured in tanks display outbreeding depression, where hybrids perform poorly, while channel catfish demonstrate superiority in growth throughout development. Our findings represent the first example, known to the authors, of opposite fitness shifts in response to environmental changes in interspecific vertebrate hybrids, suggesting a broader fitness landscape for F1 hybrids. Future genomic studies based on this experiment will help understand genome-environment interaction in shaping the F1 progeny fitness in the scenario of environment-dependent heterosis and outbreeding depression.Ye
Review of Jennifer MacLure's The Feeling of Letting Die, Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction
No full textArticle from the George Eliot Review. Digitized and hosted by the George Eliot Review Online, editor Beverley Park Rilett.Publishe
Review of Jane Robinson's Trailblazer: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: The First Feminist to Change Our World
No full textArticle from the George Eliot Review. Digitized and hosted by the George Eliot Review Online, editor Beverley Park Rilett.Publishe
More Questions of Attribution
No full textArticle from the George Eliot Review. Digitized and hosted by the George Eliot Review Online, editor Beverley Park Rilett.Publishe
George Eliot's Ideal Art
Full text linkGeorge Eliot’s poetry has often been considered apart from and subordinate to her prose. Her poetical characters have been labeled too unrealistic, her verse stilted, the content muddled with abstraction: Eliot’s early biographer Mathilde Blind states of The Spanish Gypsy (1868) that ‘Zarca, the gipsy chief, is perhaps the most vividly drawn of George Eliot’s purely ideal characters – characters which never have the flesh-and-blood reality of her Mrs. Poysers, her Silas Marners, and her dear little Totties and Eppies’. Blind states that Eliot’s ‘thoughts, instead of being naturally winged with melody, seem mechanically welded into song’. 1 For Eliot’s contemporaries, her poetry sits uneasily next to her prose, not only falling short of the realism of her novels but lacking the undefinable and transcendent quality that characterizes true poetry. But the assumption latent in Blind’s review and others was that Eliot was attempting to do in verse what she had so successfully done in her prose, when in fact, the impetus and essence of poetry, as Eliot understands it, is to transcend the form and function of prose writing. Take Eliot’s critique of Robert Browning’s Men and Women: ‘[Browning] rarely soars above a certain table-land – a footing between the level of prose and the topmost heights of poetry. He does not take possession of our souls and set them aglow, as the greatest poets – the greatest artists do’.Publishe
Mycography and Biodesign Pedagogy: Concepts and Methods for Creating Living Posters
Full text linkThis paper presents the outcomes from one design studio taught in the School of Industrial and Graphic Design at Auburn University. Students were introduced to the field of biodesign, a relatively nascent field that combines design and biology. Biodesign is a broad domain with practices that range from discursive to utilitarian and whose outcomes may be material or conceptual. This studio focused on the creation of a biodesign project that was material and discursive. In other words, students used living microorganisms to create images that promote reflection and discussion. Students began by learning an experimental image-making process, referred to here as mycography, which uses microorganisms from the fungi kingdom in lieu of ink or photo paper. Similar to darkroom photography, mycography may use light to create an image from a negative. Next, students were asked to create living images that expressed their relationship with the natural environment. Their design organism was Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is more commonly known as brewer's yeast or baker's yeast. After numerous initial tests, they created living posters that were 30 cm x 40 cm (12 in x 16 in). Unsurprisingly, in a time of ubiquitous ecological disruption, their posters expressed concern about our changing climate. The living posters that students created acted as a call-to-action and conveyed a sense of urgency about environmental degradation. At the same time, using a living organism as a design material provided a vital learning analogy for students: the images created with brewer's yeast resisted complete control and mimicked our relationship with the natural world. Through hands-on making with another organism, students gained a greater sense of agency while also recognizing the impact that design can have on other organisms.PublishedYe