aposematic

An experiment was performed to assess the relative survival of two forms of 5th instar larvae of Lygaeus equestris (Heteroptera, Lygaeidae) — the normal red form, called aposematic, and a mutant grey form, called cryptic — when given to hand-raised great tits (Parus major).Sixteen birds were presented with aposematic larvae and 16 were presented with cryptic larvae in 10 consecutive trials. One attack per trial was allowed. Both larval forms were presented against a background matching the grey larvae, but since both prey types were presented in a specific place known to the predator, detection rate for both was assumed to be unity.Birds learned to avoid both prey types. However, the survival of the aposematic larvae was higher than that of the cryptic ones due to three aspects of predator behaviour: i) a greater initial reluctance to attack, ii) a more rapid avoidance learning, and iii) a lower frequency of killing in an attack, when the prey was aposematic. Moreover, a greater number of birds learned to avoid prey without killing any individual, when the prey was aposematic. This result is considered to be due to prey coloration alone, since, in a separate test, no difference in prey distastefulness could be detected.This experiment shows that individual prey can benefit from being aposematic and indicates that individual selection can be a sufficient explanation for the evolution of aposematic coloration. It was concluded that, since the survivorship was 6.4 times higher for the aposematic prey, it could have a detection rate that is correspondingly higher than the cryptic in order for the two forms to have equal fitness.

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Molecular Biology and Genetics: Conferences & Networking

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A Future with Warmer Libraries

Socializationallows users to share their personal collections and see who else isreading the same publications, including added information suchas related papers with the same keyword (or ‘‘tag’’) and what notesother people have written about a given publication.

Personalizationallows users to say this is my library,the sources I am interested in, my collection of references, as wellas literature I have authored or co-authored.

Table 1.A summary of some of the digital libraries described in this Review.

Metadata: You can’t always GET what you want

The identity crisis, inability to get metadata easily, andproliferation of metadata standards are three of the main reasonsthat libraries are particularly difficult to use and search asautomatically as one would wish.

MetadataMetadata are data about data, e.g., publication metadata include author, date, publisher, etc

exposed and readily available, programmatically and manually,from URIs, HTML [199], and PDF files of publications.Identifying publications.URNs (such as Digital ObjectIdentifiers) should be used toidentify publications whereverpossible. Most large publishers already do this, although there arestill many confounding exceptions.Identifying people.This problem is twofold: people need tobe identified as users of a system and as authors of publications. Totackle the first issue, tools and libraries should use Single Sign On(SSO) schemes, such as OpenID [187] to provide access topersonalized features where possible, as this prevents the endlessand frustrating proliferation of username/passwords to identifyusers in Web applications. The second requires unique authoridentification, an ongoing and as yet unsolved issue for digitallibraries.By following these recommendations, publishers, scientists, andlibraries of all kinds can add significant value to the informationthey manage for the digital library

Simple URIs.URIs for human use should be as simple aspossible, to allow easy linking to individual publications and theirauthors. Short URIs are much more likely to be used and cited[192] than longer, more complicated URIs.Persistent URIs.It has been noted many times before[193,194], but it is worth repeatedly restating: persistent URIsmake digital libraries a much more useful and usable place.Although URIs will inevitably decay [195,196], many (but not all)will be preserved by the Internet Archive [197,198], and everyeffort should be made to keep them persistent where possible.Exposing metadata.Publication metadata, in whatever style(EndNote, BibTeX, XML, RDF, etc.), should be transparently

A typical workflow for using a digital library representing a subset of the literature

the size, coverage, and style of metadata used (summarized in Table 1and Figure 2). Where available, DOIs can be used to retrievemetadata for a given publication using a DOI resolver such asCrossRef [57], a linking system developed by a consortium ofpublishers. We illustrate with specific examples how URIs and DOIsare used by each library to identify, name, and locate resources,particularly individual publications and their author(s). We often takeURIs for granted, but these humble strings are fundamental to theway the Web works [58] and how libraries can exploit it, so they area crucial part of the cyberinfrastructure [59] required for e-scienceon the Web. It is easy to underestimate the value of simple URIs,which can be cited in publications, bookmarked, cut-and-pasted, e-mailed, posted in blogs, added to Web pages and wikis [60–62], andindexed by search engines. Simple URIs are a key part of the currentWeb (version 1.0) and one of the reasons for the Web’s phenomenalsuccess since appearing in 1990 [63]. As we shall demonstrate withexamples, each digital library has its own style of URI for beinglinked to (inbound links) and alternative styles of URI for linking out(outbound links) to publisher sites. Some of these links are simple,others more complex, and this has important consequences for bothhuman and programmatic access to the resources these URIsidentify.The ACM Digital Library.The Association for ComputingMachinery (ACM), probably best known for the Turing award,makes their digital library available on the Web [64]. The librarycurrently contains more than 54,000 articles from 30 journals and900 conference proceedings dating back to 1947, focusingprimarily on computer science. Like many other largepublishers, the ACM uses Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) toidentify publications. So, for example, a publication on scientificworkflows [65] from the 16th International World Wide WebConference (WWW2007) is identified by the Digital ObjectFigure 1. A mind map[207]summarizing the contents of this article in a convenient manner.doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204.g001

They rely on Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs [25] or ‘‘links’’) toidentify, name, and locate resources such as publications and theirauthors.

we shall define a digital library morebroadly as a database of scientific and technical articles,conference publications, and books that can be searched andbrowsed using a Web browser.