Stable isotope analysis (SIA) has proven to be a useful tool in reconstructing diets, characterizing trophic relationships, elucidating patterns of resource allocation, and constructing food webs. Consequently, the number of studies using SIA in trophic ecology has increased exponentially over the past decade. Several subdisciplines have developed, including isotope mixing models, incorporation dynamics models, lipid-extraction and correction methods, isotopic routing models, and compound-specific isotopic analysis. As with all tools, there are limitations to SIA. Chief among these are multiple sources of variation in isotopic signatures, unequal taxonomic and ecosystem coverage, over-reliance on literature values for key parameters, lack of canonical models, untested or unrealistic assumptions, low predictive power, and a paucity of experimental studies. We anticipate progress in SIA resulting from standardization of methods and models, calibration of model parameters through experimentation, and continued development of several recent approaches such as isotopic routing models and compound-specific isotopic analysis.
A single visual stimulus activates neurons in many different cortical areas. A major challenge in cortical physiology is to understand how the neural activity in these numerous active zones leads to a unified percept of the visual scene. The anatomical basis for these interactions is the dense network of connections that link the visual areas. Within this network, feedforward connections transmit signals from lower-order areas such as V1 or V2 to higher-order areas. In addition, there is a dense web of feedback connections which, despite their anatomical prominence, remain functionally mysterious. Here we show, using reversible inactivation of a higher-order area (monkey area V5/MT), that feedback connections serve to amplify and focus activity of neurons in lower-order areas, and that they are important in the differentiation of figure from ground, particularly in the case of stimuli of low visibility. More specifically, we show that feedback connections facilitate responses to objects moving within the classical receptive field; enhance suppression evoked by background stimuli in the surrounding region; and have the strongest effects for stimuli of low salience.
. Feedback connections act on the early part of the responses in monkey visual cortex. J Neurophysiol 85: 134 -145, 2001. We previously showed that feedback connections from MT play a role in figure/ground segmentation. Figure/ground coding has been described at the V1 level in the late part of the neuronal responses to visual stimuli, and it has been suggested that these late modulations depend on feedback connections. In the present work we tested whether it actually takes time for this information to be fed back to lower order areas. We analyzed the extracellular responses of 169 V1, V2, and V3 neurons that we recorded in two anesthetized macaque monkeys. MT was inactivated by cooling. We studied the time course of the responses of the neurons that were significantly affected by the inactivation of MT to see whether the effects were delayed relative to the onset of the response. We first measured the time course of the feedback influences from MT on V1, V2, and V3 neurons tested with moving stimuli. For the large majority of the 51 neurons for which the response decreased, the effect was present from the beginning of the response. In the responses averaged after normalization, the decrease of response was significant in the first 10-ms bin of response. A similar result was found for six neurons for which the response significantly increased when MT was inactivated. We then looked at the time course of the responses to flashed stimuli (95 neurons). We observed 15 significant decreases of response and 14 significant increases. In both populations, the effects were significant within the first 10 ms of response. For some neurons with increased responses we even observed a shorter latency when MT was inactivated. We measured the latency of the response to the flashed stimuli. We found that even the earliest responding neurons were affected early by the feedback from MT. This was true for the response to flashed and to moving stimuli. These results show that feedback connections are recruited very early for the treatment of visual information. It further indicates that the presence or absence of feedback effects cannot be deduced from the time course of the response modulations.
The duration of Drosophila melanogaster larval and pupal periods was measured in laboratory thermal lines and in populations collected along a latitudinal transect in eastern Australia. In replicated laboratory lines kept for 9 years at 16.5" C or 25" C the duration of larval development had continued to diverge compared with 4 and 5 years previously, with more rapid larval development, and hence reduced total duration of pre-adult development, in the low temperature lines at both experimental temperatures. After 4 years of separate evolution, lines derived from the 25" C lines and subsequently cultured at 29" C showed no evidence of significant divergence in the duration of any part of the pre-adult period. The geographic populations showed a decrease in the duration of larval development, and hence of the total pre-adult period, with increasing latitude. In both laboratory and field populations, evolution at lower temperature was associated with more rapid larval development to a larger adult body size, the opposite genetic correlation between these traits to that found within a single temperature. The indications are that lower temperatures may be permissive of more efficient growth in D. melanogaster. It will be important to discover if evolution in response to temperature induces similar correlations in other ectotherms.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.