In the News; General from May 2023

In the News
122

Perhaps herbivorous would have been a better choice of word.

The paper’s paywalled at Springer, but there’s a copy at ResearchGate. This is a possibility that’s quite obvious when pointed out, but they didn’t manage to show that it’s adaptive.

They link to a paper that makes a case for Nepenthes ampullaria being “detritivorous”. They suggest a model where mosquito larvae in the pitcher feed on leaf litter, and the Nepenthes scavenges nitrogen excreted by the larvae. This reminds me of leaf cutter ants, which bring leaves into their nests for fungi to grow on, the ants then consuming the fungi, or, close to home, humans feeding maize (etc.) to cattle and harvesting milk from those cattle.

123

Herbivore is not so catchy as a title?

ResearchGate.

You have mentioned an observation that I have wondered about off and on, i.e. articles published behind a paywall & also free on ResearchGate.

Wikipedia offers this : ResearchGate - Wikipedia

ResearchGate uses a crawler to find PDF versions of articles on the homepages of authors and .[publishers.[5]: Q6 These are then presented as if they had been uploaded to the web site by the author:[5]: Q7, Q8 the PDF will be displayed embedded in a frame, and only the button label “External Download” indicates that the file was in fact not uploaded to ResearchGate.[citation needed].

It has also been criticized for copyright infringement of published works.

In September 2017, lawyers representing the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) sent a letter to ResearchGate threatening legal action against them for copyright infringement and demanding that they alter their handling of uploaded articles to include pre-release checking for copyright violations and "Specifically, [for ResearchGate to] end its extraction of content from hosted articles and the modification of any hosted content, including any and all metadata.

Subsequently, Coalition for Responsible Sharing (CfRS) reported that “ResearchGate has removed from public view a significant number of copyrighted articles it is hosting on its site”.[55] CfRS also confirmed that “not all violations have been addressed” and as such, takedown notices have been issued.[56]

ResearchGate has managed to achieve an agreement on article uploading with three other major publishers, Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press and Thieme. Under the agreement, the publishers will be notified when their articles are uploaded but will not be able to premoderate uploads.[57]

……….

I generally support Copyright issues especially because the author of a photo finds his/ her work used sometimes without even an attribution.

Some aspects of copyright, e.g those USA laws for the benefit of corporations, not individuals, which have been forced on everyone, I am not enamoured by.
………
Later… this publication , Nimis & Martello 2003, A second checklist of the lichens of Italy with a thesaurus of synonyms, is a book. It has been downloaded to Researchgate as a pdf. I thought I’d save the link, but Safari blocked it. Perhaps Safari has blocked all Researchgate links.

124

:heart: All very interesting reading…thanks :heart:

125

This makes passing reference to the reasons for the observations (the survival of the fittest in terms of the fitter gene pool expanding); still it’s good to see examples in the press.

126

Another instance is cod reproducing at a smaller size.

Also see Flowers ‘giving up’ on scarce insects and evolving to self-pollinate, say scientists | Wild flowers | The Guardian

127

Orange dwarf cave crocodiles: The crocs that crawled into a cave, ate bats, and started mutating into a new species

128

Crocs, I was intrigued enough to follow it up.
« Intriguingly, genetic evidence to date suggests that the cave crocs may be splitting from their outside relatives. One of the haplotypes – a set of genes from one of their parents – of the cave crocodiles has not been found in the outside African dwarf crocodiles.

“The [crocodiles in the] caves of Abanda stand out as an isolated genetic group,” expalined Oslisly. He says that the data to date show this cave group split off thousands of years ago from its outdoorsy relatives.«
.
« Outdoorsy crocs » sound quite friendly, I think, but the » indoorsy cave crocs » look more manageable.