E. myurus breeds seasonally during the warm and wet spring and summer months and cessation of breeding occurs during the cold and dry winter months of the southern hemisphere. Pregnant females were only collected from August through to January. Ovarian size and plasma progesterone started to increase a few months prior to the first rains, were highest in October and decreased thereafter. Follicular growth and corpora body numbers corresponded to this BAY 73-4506 datasheet seasonal reproductive pattern. Testes and seminiferous tubule size and plasma testosterone concentration has already started to increase during the coldest months, 2 months prior to reproductive onset in females. We propose that

seasonal reproduction evolved in E. myurus because of seasonally changing AZD4547 cell line food availability brought about by severe seasonal changes in rainfall and ambient temperature. The direct effects of rainfall and ambient temperature on reproduction of E. myurus are ambiguous,

and we discuss other environmental factors that may trigger reproductive onset in this species. “
“Scat analysis is one of the most frequently used methods to assess carnivoran diets, and global positioning system (GPS) cluster methods are increasingly being used to locate feeding sites for large carnivorans. However, both methods have inherent biases that limit their use. GPS methods to locate kill sites are biased towards large carcasses, while scat analysis overestimates the biomass consumed from smaller prey. We combined carcass observations and scats collected along known movement routes, assessed using GPS data from four African lion Panthera leo prides in the Kruger

National Park, South Africa, to determine how a combination of these two datasets change diet estimates. As expected, using carcasses alone underestimated the number of feeding events on small species, ioxilan primarily impala Aepycerosmelampus and warthog Phacochoerus africanus, in our case, by more than 50%, and thus significantly underestimated the biomass consumed per pride per day in comparison with when the diet was assessed using carcass observations alone. We show that an approach that supplements carcass observations with scats that enables the identification of potentially missed feeding events increases the estimates of food intake rates for large carnivorans, with possible ramifications for predator–prey interaction studies dealing with biomass intake rate. “
“In this study we investigated bite force and functional morphology of the feeding mechanism of the great barracuda Sphyraena barracuda through ontogeny. Theoretical estimates of bite force at two bite points were calculated for a size series of barracuda ranging from 18 to 130 cm TL (n=27) using a three-dimensional static equilibrium model.