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Publications (202)
Deagrarianisation (cropland, field abandonment) is a widespread global phenomenon with high potential for carbon sequestration and for reversing biodiversity extinction debt thus promoting environmental sustainability and conservation. To date, much work on this topic has focused on plant succession and associated plant diversity, but few studies h...
Keywords: canid carnivore communication latrine Lycaon scent marking social behaviour territoriality Individual patterns of scent marking can aid our understanding of the function of animal latrines. African wild dogs are pack-living social carnivores that regularly visit latrines, called shared marking sites, used by multiple neighbouring packs. H...
Cryptic species present a challenge for conservation, as species diversity may remain undetected. In zoological research, DNA barcoding of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) has become a useful heuristic tool for aiding species resolution and informing species discovery. Despite concerted efforts to genetically barcode bats and...
The Amathole forest complex is the breeding stronghold of the endemic and vulnerable Cape Parrot Poicephalus robustus , and is also one of only two forest complexes in South Africa formally harvested for timber. The aim of this study was to determine if formal harvesting of indigenous trees, primarily the two yellowwood species Afrocarpus falcatus...
Cryptic species present a challenge for conservation, as undetected diversity may be lost. DNA barcoding of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) has become a useful heuristic tool for delimiting species boundaries and detecting cryptic speciation across different animal taxa. Despite concerted efforts to genetically barcode bats a...
Apex predators ideally require vast intact spaces that support sufficient prey abundances to sustain them. In a developing world, however, it is becoming extremely difficult to maintain large enough areas to facilitate apex predators outside of protected regions. Free-roaming leopards ( Panthera pardus ) are the last remaining apex predator in the...
Scent marks deposited as semiochemical signals are a primary mode of communication for a broad range of mammal species. Such scent signals are often deposited at specific, frequently visited marking sites called latrines. Despite descriptions of widespread latrine use by numerous mammal species, detailed understanding of site visit rates and latrin...
Rhabdomys is a genus that occupies a variety of habitats, including forest margins. Among the Rhabdomys taxa, Rhabdomys dilectus chakae has a distribution that covers the eastern seaboard of South Africa, with a poorly defined divergence date from its sister taxon Rhabdomys dilectus dilectus. Here, we study three mitochondrial markers (cytochrome b...
The Amathole mistbelt forests in the Eastern Cape, South Africa harbour the largest remnant population of the nationally endangered endemic Cape Parrot Poicephalus robustus, a secondary-cavity nester whose persistence is limited by suitable nest sites. These are also the only forests within Cape Parrot range in which selective timber harvesting rem...
Aim
Pleistocene climate shifts were influential in shaping biodiversity patterns for forest‐dependent species. Within southern Africa, palaeoclimatic shifts possibly homogenised subtropical Afromontane forest biodiversity, yet these forests continue to harbour unique diversity. For the three songbird species with different natural histories, we inv...
Hatching/birthing asynchrony, when siblings emerge at least 12 h apart, is thought to be a significant driver of phenotypic variation and group cohesion that is commonly reported in invertebrates and birds, but rarely in squamates. We examined birthing asynchrony in African cordylid lizards (Cordylidae), a clade characterized by a wide range of soc...
Species confined to naturally fragmented habitats may exhibit intrinsic population complexity which may challenge interpretations of species response to anthropogenic landscape transformation. In South Africa, where native forests are naturally fragmented, forest‐dependent birds have undergone range declines since 1992, most notably among insectivo...
Citation: Matamba E, Richards LR, Cherry MI, Rambau RV (2021) DNA barcoding of the mesic adapted striped mouse, Rhabdomys dilectus in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa. Vertebrate Zoology 71. Vertebrate Zoology 71 503-515. https://doi. Abstract South African small mammals are under-represented in DNA barcoding efforts, pa...
Aim
Forest fragmentation is a major driver of biodiversity loss causing declines in species richness and functional diversity of biotic communities. Bats are essential components of ecosystems and are useful bio‐indicators of habitat disturbance, yet the response and vulnerability of bats to fragmentation have been poorly studied in Africa. We aim...
Bats are a highly diverse order with substantial economic and ecological value. Similarly, forests in South Africa form a valuable biome supporting unique biotic diversity, yet forest bat communities have not previously been surveyed. We sampled 17 forests, of seven forest types and three forest groups, in the Eastern Cape and southern KwaZulu-Nata...
Competitive productivity (CP) was introduced into the literature by Baumann et al. (2019) to combine the concepts of competitiveness and productivity that were previously treated separately from theory and practice perspectives. CP is defined as follows: “Competitive Productivity is in essence both an attitude and a behaviour directed at outperform...
The Eastern Cape Province harbors almost half of the indigenous forest in South Africa, but these forests are threatened by large-scale agricultural and urban development planned for the coming decade. Additional anthropogenic development is likely to cause further fragmentation and degradation of forests inhabited by the dusky pipistrelle bat (Pip...
Forests in South Africa are under threat from a variety of anthropogenic land use changes; however, the impacts of these changes on wildlife populations are poorly understood. To address this issue, a pan-European trait-based risk assessment framework was modified for use in South Africa. This framework allows the identification of habitats and spe...
Mass gatherings have been implicated in higher rates of transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and many sporting events have been restricted or canceled to limit disease spread (1). Based on current CDC COVID-19 mitigation recommendations related to events and gatherings (2), Major League Baseball (ML...
The Eastern Cape Province harbours 46% of South Africa’s remaining indigenous forest cover, and is one of the country’s poorest and least developed provinces. Forest resources thus represent a vital component of rural livelihoods in this region. Consequently, forest management policies aim to balance the needs of resource users with the ecological...
African forests are under increasing pressure to supply local, regional, and international demand for timber. Much of this trade is unregulated, such that there is increasing concern regarding the ecological sustainability of this resource use. However, there is a lack of studies investigating the ecological impact of informal timber harvesting in...
Historical forest contractions may have restricted the distributions of forest-utilizing fauna while providing opportunities for range expansions for open-habitat species. We aimed to test if habitat associations have played an important role in determining population genetic structure and demographic responses of six bats to oscillations in forest...
Historical forest contractions may have restricted the distributions of forest-utilizing fauna while providing opportunities for range expansions for open-habitat species. We aimed to test if habitat associations have played an important role in determining population genetic structure and demographic responses of six bats to oscillations in forest...
In this study, we examined the phylogeographical structure of three frog species (Anhydrophryne rattrayi, Arthroleptis wageri and Cacosternum nanum) in the Eastern and Western Cape provinces of South Africa. The first two species are forest dwelling and exhibit direct development, whereas the last species is a habitat generalist, breeding in open f...
There is a paucity of molecular DNA barcoding informatics on the South African fauna, particularly on terrestrial small mammals. This study tested the utility of DNA barcoding in the dark-footed forest shrew (Myosorex cafer) from forested regions of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa. Sampled forests included coastal scarp...
Point counts and mist-netting are two frequently employed survey techniques used in assessing forest avian communities, although the reliability of these methods varies according to species composition and habitat. This study investigates how effectively these two methods survey forest bird community structures within South African Afrotemperate fo...
Forest management in many developing nations aims to balance the needs of resource users and the ecological integrity of indigenous forests, in terms of both biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services, particularly carbon sequestration. While South Africa has legislated management policies to achieve this, implementation
has been lacking, res...
Background
Harvesting of forest products is a widespread driver of disturbance in developing nations, where policies are increasingly aimed at managing natural forests for sustainable use. There is thus need for research aimed at understanding the impact of resource use on forest habitats and concomitant effects on biodiversity. Afromontane forests...
The ecological impact of forest product harvesting is poorly understood despite the reliance of millions of impoverished households on forest resources. As birds are indicators of environmental change and essential for the function and regeneration of forest ecosystems, this study aimed to assess the response of bird species richness and functional...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of competitiveness. The authors introduce the concept of Competitive Productivity (CP), supplementing shortcomings of traditional understandings of national, organisational and individual productivity which overlook the nature of competitiveness, i.e. outperforming the competition, o...
This multi-discipline research, covering client relationships and the public accounting space, investigated trust in the relationship between Australia’s public accountants and their small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) clients. It describes the contribution of the accountancy profession to the SME sector, as well as the key challenges faced by...
This multi-discipline research investigated the determinants of trust in the relationship between Australia's public accountants and their small and medium-sized (SME) clients. In excess of four hundred SME owners, across Australia, were surveyed to test a proposed model and client intimacy variables were found to be the most significant predictors...
Forests in South Africa are harvested by local communities for multiple purposes and this affects the animals that inhabit them. The tree hyrax (Dendrohyrax arboreus) has a restricted distribution and utilises various tree species as dens and a source of food. In this article, we determined, through a series of interviews in the communities surroun...
Individual specificity can be found in the vocalizations of many avian and mammalian species. However, it is often difficult to determine whether these vocal cues to identity rise from “unselected” individual differences in vocal morphology or whether they have been accentuated by selection for the purposes of advertising caller identity. By compar...
Competitiveness of Asian vis-à-vis Western Firms and Nations: Concepts, Measurements
and Explanations
Chairs:
Chris Baumann, Macquarie University
Hemant Merchant, University of South Florida St. Petersburg
Panelists:
Chris Baumann, Macquarie University
Michael Cherry, Macquarie University
Tony Fang, Stockholm University
Hemant Merchant, Universi...
Social complexity and communicative complexity appear to have coevolved in terrestrial vertebrates. Understanding the information conveyed within the social signals of group-living taxa can illuminate the selection pressures impacting on a species and help to identify the factors promoting sociality. Within vocal communication, recruitment calls ar...
The information transmitted by acoustic signals has attracted much scientific interest in recent years. However, isolation calls, which are long-distance vocalizations used by lost group members to reunite with their social group, have been surprisingly neglected. These calls assist in maintaining group cohesion and are thus particularly important...
Global declines in cuckoo numbers have been variously attributed to reduced prey availability; changes in their hosts’ ranges; or climate-induced changes. We used data from two Southern African Bird Atlas Projects to determine whether migrant cuckoo species breeding in South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland have experienced range shifts during the pas...
Forest ecosystems in South Africa are at risk from a variety of anthropogenic threats impacting the faunal species dependent on them. These impacts often differ depending on species-specific characteristics. Range data on forest dependent bird species from the South African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP1 and SABAP2) were analysed to determine links bet...
We have reviewed the most important results relating to particular egg characteristics responsible for recognition and subsequent rejection by hosts of brood parasites. Hosts remove a foreign egg after determining that it differs in one or more parameters. In turn, brood parasites have often evolved various mechanisms to confuse host defences and p...
Intense intrasexual competition for breeding opportunities is a characteristic of cooperatively breeding species with high reproductive skew. In such ‘singular’ cooperative breeders, females suffer greater variability in direct reproductive success than do males, and this in turn leads to greater intrasexual competition in females. Under such circu...
Michael Cherry catches up with new developments and old dilemmas at South Africa's hominin-fossil hotspot.
Certain light environments may hinder egg discrimination by hosts of foreign eggs, which could in some circumstances lead to the acceptance of non-mimetic eggs by hosts. We measured light parameters at red bishop (Euplectes orix) nests and used a model of avian visual processing to quantify the detectability of eggs in the light environment in whic...
Many socially monogamous bird species follow a genetically promiscuous reproductive strategy. Duetting birds may be an exception, as they appear to exhibit very low levels of extra pair paternity—which is thought to be connected to duetting. Duets are predicted to function either in paternity guarding or as signals of commitment to the pair bond, r...
Crimson-breasted shrikes produce duets which are used in interactions with neighbours and intruders. We examined two major hypotheses explaining duetting, the territorial defence and mate guarding hypotheses, using playback experiments. The responses of 12 pairs towards solo male, solo female and stereo duet playback were analysed using principal c...
One of the most important measures of offspring performance is growth rate, which is often traded off against another important survival trait, immune function. A particular feature of ostrich chicks maintained in farmed environments is that cohorts of chicks vary widely in size. As parents can have a profound effect on the phenotype and fitness of...
Many of the mechanisms advanced to explain the evolution of intraspecific cooperative behaviour, such
as reciprocity or social prestige, hinge on an animal’s ability to recognize individual group members.
However, ‘true’ individual recognition, between adult group members, has never been demonstrated in a
cooperatively breeding bird or mammal speci...
We analysed avian diversity in 8 similar-sized regions of Africa, and in an additional 16 regions spread across the world; half of these 24 regions were tropical and the other half were temperate. For each region, counts of species, genus, family and order were recorded rather than only a species count. We assert that this approach gives more accur...
Many mammal species adopt marking postures that elevate their scent deposits. The most extreme of these is handstand marking, in which an individual reverses against an upright object, flings its hind legs into the air above its back and balances bipedally on its fore feet. The resulting anogenital deposit is thus raised one full body length above...
Avian vocal duets are joint displays where paired birds produce temporally and structurally coordinated vocalisations. Duets show great variety in form that can reflect different functions, such as mate guarding, mutual recognition, pair bond maintenance or territory defence. By describing the structure of duets and singing behaviour, we can invest...
South Africa is vying fiercely with Australia to host a giant radio
telescope that may never be built — but the competition itself is
changing the country's science landscape.
It has been proposed that blue-green egg colours have evolved as a post-mating signal of female quality, selected by males allocating their parental effort in response to the strength of this signal. We tested two main assumptions of the sexually selected egg coloration hypothesis: (1) whether the intensity of eggshell blue-green chroma (BGC) refle...
On 21 October 2010, the Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, announced an additional allocation of over R250 million from the current (2010/2011) budget to the National Research Foundation (NRF). The funds are ring-fenced for specified human resources development initiatives (R100 million), scientific equipment under the national equi...
The differential allocation hypothesis predicts that females should invest more in reproduction when paired with attractive males. We measured egg volume in Cape sugarbirds (Promerops cafer), a sexually dimorphic passerine, in relation to paternity of the offspring and in response to an experimental tail length treatment. We manipulated tail length...
Recent work suggests that the evolution of egg coloration may have been constrained in three important ways that have not yet been critically synthesized in any review. First, on account of birds being able to see in the ultraviolet spectrum, the interaction between the properties of avian vision and the light environment of nests imply different p...
Traditional models of amphibian dispersal and gene flow point to low dispersal and high philopatry. In recent years, this traditional view has been challenged and it appears that no general model holds across taxa. Conservation of amphibians cannot be addressed on an over-arching scale, but must come on a case-by-case basis, especially for range-re...
Many animals must trade-off anti-predator vigilance with other behaviours. Some species facilitate predator detection by joining mixed-species foraging parties and 'eavesdropping' on the predator warnings given by other taxa. Such use of heterospecific warnings presumably reduces the likelihood of predation, but it is unclear whether it also provid...
Row may impact on South Africa's bid to host the Square Kilometre Array telescope.
Extrapair mating is known to occur in many animals and potentially has a significant influence on reproductive success. Female extrapair mate choice may explain the occurrence of exaggerated ornaments in socially monogamous species, but the influence of ornamentation on extrapair mating success has rarely been investigated experimentally. Cape suga...
A tradeoff between immune response and life history traits, in particular growth rate, has been documented in various bird
species. Ostriches are fast-growing birds and a typical feature of cohorts is that offspring often differ greatly in size.
We investigated the relationship between hatching date and growth rate of chicks and both cell-mediated...
The rich fossil record of the family Equidae (Mammalia: Perissodactyla) over the past 55 MY has made it an icon for the patterns and processes of macroevolution. Despite this, many aspects of equid phylogenetic relationships and taxonomy remain unresolved. Recent genetic analyses of extinct equids have revealed unexpected evolutionary patterns and...
Vigilance behaviour in gregarious species has been studied extensively, especially the relationship between individual vigilance
and group size, which is often negative. Relatively little is known about the effect of conspecifics on vigilance in non-obligate
social species or the influence of sociality itself on antipredator tactics. We investigate...
It has been suggested that secondary sexual ornamentation signals male ability to resist infections, as only high-quality individuals are able to invest both in high immune defence and elaborate ornament expression. Such ornaments could thus serve as indicators of male quality and could be used by females in choosing mates. Ostriches are sexually d...
Life history theory predicts that females should modify their investment in a particular breeding attempt according to the likelihood of its success, as the investment of females in reproduction is typically higher than that of males. The ostrich mating system is promiscuous, and is thus a particularly interesting one in which to investigate differ...
The yellow mongoose Cynictis penicillata is a facultatively social species and provides an opportunity to study the evolution of social behaviour. We examined genetic structure, relatedness and helping behaviour in the yellow mongoose in natural habitat in the Kalahari Desert, where the species lives in small family groups of up to four individuals...
Table 1 Acoustic description of call types used by the yellow mongoose. N refers to sample sizes. Subsets of these calls were used in discriminant function analyses, as described in the text
recent decline of the quiver tree (Aloe dichotoma) in South Africa and Namibia. This species appears to conform to these trends: it is disappearing in the north of its range in northern Namibia; and at lower altitudes. So far, it has been unable to establish itself in the cooler south, seemingly because rains are not heavy enough. Reduced rainfall...
Data on the relationships between body size and age were obtained for a sample of leopard toads Bufo pardalis from a breeding population of this species from the Cape Peninsula, South Africa. Age was determined by counting the number of lines of arrested growth in histological sections of a digit clipped from each individual. In males there was a p...
We describe the vocal repertoire of a facultatively social carnivore, the yellow mongoose, Cynictis penicillata. Using a combination of close-range observations, recordings, and experiments with simulated predators, we were able to obtain clear descriptions of call structure and function for a wide range of calls used by this herpestid. The vocal r...
We investigated the hypothesis that the common cuckoo Cuculus canorus selects host pairs of good phenotypic quality. As there is some evidence that cuckoos may select hosts within a population non-randomly based on external cues reflecting their foster abilities, we predicted that great reed warbler Acrocephalus arundinaceus pairs parasitized by th...
We investigated scent marking behaviour in the yellow mongoose Cynictis penicillata, focusing on a low-density population where all offspring dispersed upon reaching sexual maturity. Dominant males appeared to be the main territory defenders and demarcators, with offspring foraging and marking only near the territory cores. The cheek-marking rates...
The audience effect has been shown in numerous group-living vertebrates but whether it is present in facultatively social species is unknown. We investigated the antipredator responses of the yellow mongoose, a mammal that dens in groups but primarily forages alone. To examine the effect that the social environment has on their communication, we pe...