To flee somewhere far away and then return, or to stay put and wait things out? That was the dilemma faced by small mammals during the last glacial period. Some made it – but how did they survive, and where?
In the breeding season 1988/89, within the region of SSSI No. 8, nesting of 12 species of birds was observed. The highest number of nests — 24430 — belonged to three species of pygoscelid penguins; 77.1% were the Adelie penguin. Relatively high fluctuations in the number of penguins in some rookeries in particular breeding seasons were confirmed. During regular countings of mammals' in 1988 the presence of 5 species of Pinnipedia was noted, of which the southern elephant seal was most numerous in the summer season, whereas crabeater seal — in winter. In the region of SSSI No. 8, breeding of southern elephant seal and Weddell seal was observed. Fluctuations in the number of seals in this region in the period 1977—1988 were insignificant.
Throughout 1978 regular counts of pinniped mammals were conducted along as 12-kilometre-long stretch of the Admiralty Bay coasts. The occurrence of all the six species of antarctic seals was noted, among them the most numerous were Mirounga leonina, Arctocephalus tropicalis and Lobodon carcinophagus. The number of these animals varied within a year-cycle. M. leonina and Leptonychotes weddelli breed at Admiralty Bay.
Repellent usage against rodents is almost not provided anymore. Permission to use many rodent repellent substances under European Union (EU) plant protection regulations has not been renewed in recent years. Some approval for chemical substances have not been renewed due to their toxicological properties, and for some biorational approvals have also not been renewed due to lack of financial support together with other concerns. Some other rodent repellent substances possessing accurate properties in a secondary way have also been withdrawn. Thus, the use of almost ten active substances is now illegal. The lack of support and the resultant orphan use may be explained by the relatively small market and possible business together with the expectations of modern substance application requirements. As a result, the opportunity to consider new biorational substances as candidates is therefore open. Plant based food substances are preferred candidates for plant protection considering their favourable toxicological characteristics. Capsicum oleoresin, a mixture obtained from two spice species (Capsicum annuum and C. frutescens), is one of them with appropriate repellent properties. An application under EU Plant Protection Product regulation has recently been submitted and may become a new repellent for biological control agent against seed predators.
The arylsulphatase activity (E. C. 3. 1.6. 1.) was compared in different species ol Antarctic mammals, birds of the genus Pygoscelis, fish of the genus Notothenia and two crustaceans oi the genus Euphausia. The role of arylsulphatase in the hydrolysis of sulphate phenol esters was pointed out. Considerable differences were observed in the arylsulphatase activity both within genera and species. But no differences in the activity of the enzyme examined were observed in relation to the sex or maturity stage of gonads of chosen Antarctic animals. The activity of arylsulphatase from liver and hepato- pancreas homogenates оf Antarctic animals was lower than the activity of this enzyme in similar animals of the temperate zone.
Elusive phenomena such as the parental care habits of prehistoric animals would seem to be forever inaccessible to paleontological research. However, new spectacular finds offer some deeper insight into such behavior.
Marine mammal identification and classification for passive acoustic monitoring remain a challenging task. Mainly the interspecific and intraspecific variations in calls within species and among different individuals of single species make it more challenging. Varieties of species along with geographical diversity induce more complications towards an accurate analysis of marine mammal classification using acoustic signatures. Prior methods for classification focused on spectral features which result in increasing bias for contour base classifiers in automatic detection algorithms. In this study, acoustic marine mammal classification is performed through the fusion of 1D Local Binary Pattern (1D-LBP) and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) based features. Multi-class Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier is employed to identify different classes of mammal sounds. Classification of six species named Tursiops truncatus, Delphinus delphis, Peponocephala electra, Grampus griseus, Stenella longirostris, and Stenella attenuate are targeted in this research. The proposed model achieved 90.4% accuracy on 70–30% training testing and 89.6% on 5-fold cross-validation experiments.