Two new species of Multiclavula (lichenized basidiomycetes) from savanna soils in Rwanda (East Africa)

Two new species of Multiclavula are described from Rwanda: M. akagerae , with a thallus consisting of turgescent glomerules, and M. rugaramae , with a thallus composed of flattened, rounded, marginate, and dispersed squamules. They grow on soil in frequently burned savannas or on lateritic soils in eastern Rwanda. The genus Lepidostroma should probably be reduced into synonymy with Multiclavula .  © 2007 The Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society , 2007, 155 , 457–465.     

Prey Capture and Feeding in the Social Spider Anelosimus eximius

Wild colonies of the social spider Anelosimus eximius (Araneae, Theridiidae) appear often to be food-limited and not all females come to reproduction. Using a limited number of marked females in an artificial colony, set up in the laboratory, this study attempts a first analysis of the participation in prey capture and ingestion. Marked females of the same age and experience were observed during the attack of prey insects, the ensuing transportation of the prey to the retreat, and the feeding session. No correlation was found between the time females spent hunting and the time they spent feeding. Females that laid eggs had fed longer and imbibed more nutrients, but had not hunted more than those females that did not reproduce. These, it is speculated, were denied access to the prey by the reproducing females.     

aflpdat: a collection of r functions for convenient handling of AFLP data

aflpdat is a collection of R functions that facilitates the handling of dominant genotypic data. It converts data from a standard tab‐separated table to the input formats of the following programs: arlequin , structure , treecon , paup and hickory . In addition, it calculates the proportion of polymorphic markers in each population, and estimates gene diversity as the average proportion of pairwise differences between individuals with confidence intervals based on bootstrapping across markers. It also produces summary tables of marker frequencies and the presence or absence of markers in each population. aflpdat can be downloaded from http://www.nhm.uio.no/ncb/ .