Assessing conservation attitudes and behaviors of Congolese children neighboring the world's first bonobo (Pan paniscus) release site

Poaching and habitat destruction in the Congo Basin threaten African great apes including the bonobo (Pan paniscus), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and gorillas (Gorilla spp.) with extinction. One way to combat extinction is to reintroduce rescued and rehabilitated apes and repopulate native habitats. Reintroduction programs are only successful if they are supported by local populations. Ekolo ya Bonobo, located in Equateur province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is the world's only reintroduction site for rehabilitated bonobos. Here we assess whether children, of the Ilonga‐Pôo, living adjacent to Ekolo ya Bonobo demonstrate more pro‐ape conservation attitudes than children living in, Kinshasa, the capital city. We examined children's attitudes toward great apes because children are typically the focus of conservation education programs. We used the Great Ape Attitude Questionnaire to test the Contact Hypothesis, which posits that proximity to great ape habitat influences pro‐conservation attitudes toward great apes. Ilonga‐Pôo children who live in closer contact with wild bonobos felt greater responsibility to protect great apes compared to those in Kinshasa who live outside the natural habitat of great apes. These results suggest that among participants in the DRC, spatial proximity to a species fosters a greater sense of responsibility to protect and conserve. These results have implications for the successful implementation of great ape reintroduction programs in the Congo Basin. The data analyzed in this study were collected in 2010 and therefore provide a baseline for longitudinal study of this reintroduction site.     

Comparison of amino acid levels in rat blood obtained by catheterization and decapitation

A novel, sensitive and highly resolving amino acid analysis procedure was developed and used to compare two methods of obtaining blood from experimental animals. The procedure, utilizing a meter long microbore HPLC column containing spherical cation-exchange resin and fluorescence detection following postcolumn reaction with o-phthaldialdehyde, was shown to reliably measure forty-one primary amine components in rat plasma.Comparison of values from blood obtained by decapitation and by catheterization documented the significant artifactual influence of the decapitation procedure on approximately half of the measured constituents.     

Cell cycle analysis of asexual stages of erythrocytic malaria parasites

Abstract. Intra-erythrocytic Plasmodium species can be stained with the DNA binding dye, Hoechst 33342, and the distribution of DNA content determined for parasite populations by flow cytometric measurement of fluorescence. Analysis of this distribution will determine the parasitaemia (percentage of erythrocytes infected), and the percentages of trophozoite infected red blood cells, polyparasitized (trophozoite) red blood cells, and schizont/segmenter infected red blood cells. This analysis is based on the hypothesis that the asexual parasites cycle with single G₁ period, and effectively, a single S phase with no significant G₂/M period except at schizogony when the genome DNA content is equivalent to 8 N or higher, dependent on the species. Data are presented to support this model.