Phenice's visual sexing technique for the os pubis: a critique

Innominate bones from 362 California Indians were sexed with Phenice's three non-metrical features of the os pubis. The frequencies of marked, intermediate, and absent cases of these three morphological features were tabulated in males and females to see if unambiguous and reliable distinctions were consistently available. The results suggest that Phenice's technique offered extremely reliable sex evaluations in this material.     

A sequential test for assessing observed agreement between raters

Assessing the agreement between two or more raters is an important topic in medical practice. Existing techniques, which deal with categorical data, are based on contingency tables. This is often an obstacle in practice as we have to wait for a long time to collect the appropriate sample size of subjects to construct the contingency table. In this paper, we introduce a nonparametric sequential test for assessing agreement, which can be applied as data accrues, does not require a contingency table, facilitating a rapid assessment of the agreement. The proposed test is based on the cumulative sum of the number of disagreements between the two raters and a suitable statistic representing the waiting time until the cumulative sum exceeds a predefined threshold. We treat the cases of testing two raters' agreement with respect to one or more characteristics and using two or more classification categories, the case where the two raters extremely disagree, and finally the case of testing more than two raters' agreement. The numerical investigation shows that the proposed test has excellent performance. Compared to the existing methods, the proposed method appears to require significantly smaller sample size with equivalent power. Moreover, the proposed method is easily generalizable and brings the problem of assessing the agreement between two or more raters and one or more characteristics under a unified framework, thus providing an easy to use tool to medical practitioners.     

Is coexistence mediated by microhabitat segregation? An in-depth exploration of a fish invasion

Vendace Coregonus albula has invaded the subarctic Pasvik hydrosystem, northern Norway and Russia, after being translocated from its native Finnish range into Lake Inari (Finland), upstream of Pasvik. The development of the invader and the effects on two native lake communities in the upstream and downstream part of the hydrosystem, respectively, have been monitored since 1991. In the upstream lake location, the invader relegated the native whitefish Coregonus lavaretus from the pelagic habitat within a few years. An expected similar development in the downstream location was, however, not observed. Data are presented on the diet and microhabitat use (vertical pelagic zone) for three types of replicated situation: (1) the invader v. the native species, (2) upstream v . downstream lakes and (3) early and late invasion stages, to explore the outcome of the competitive interactions. The use of different microhabitats available within the deeper pelagic zone in the downstream location was observed to have delayed the negative effects on native whitefish, possibly enabling a persistent coexistence between the two species in the pelagic zone of this lake.     

Temperature and starvation effects on food exploitation by Argentine ants and native ants in New Zealand

The abundance and distribution of an invasive species is influenced by its relative ability to find resources under a variety of conditions. We examined the exploitative ability of the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile (Mayr)), in comparison with two common New Zealand ant species Monomorium antarcticum (Fr. Smith) and Prolasius advenus (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) (Fr. Smith), using maze trials under different temperature and starvation regimes. Our results showed temperature significantly affected the mean time to discover food resources, but different species responded differently to changes in temperature. A change in temperature from 23°C to 13°C resulted in an approximately 8‐fold increase in the time to discover food for native P. advenus, but discovery times remained relatively similar for invasive Argentine ants. Starvation did not significantly influence the ability of species to find food. Argentine ants consistently located and recruited to food faster than the native species. We examined for variation in walking speed under the experimental conditions as a mechanism for our results. The results revealed Argentine ants and P. advenus to have similar walking speeds at each temperature‐starvation treatment and both were faster than M. antarcticum. However, Argentine ants had rates of turning or returning to the nest that were lower than the native species. This result suggests that Argentine ants show greater ‘exploratory willingness’ or ‘novelty seeking’ behaviour. Our results suggest that Argentine ants are able to discovery and exploit resources more efficiently than these native species under a wide spectrum of environmental and physiological conditions. Such relative efficiencies have likely contributed to the success of this invader.     

Introduction of the African Catfish Clarias gariepinus (BURCHELL, 1822) into Southern Brazil

We record here the introduction of the African catfish Clarias gariepinus into the Guaraguaçu River basin in Paraná State, Brazil, an area with an extremely rich endemic fish fauna, including many catfishes. C. gariepinus was introduced as escapees from ponds built for recreational angling. These catfishes are very large and hard predators, thus posing serious potential for impact on the native fish fauna. The impact of C. gariepinus needs study with emphasis on finding means for controlling its spread.