Functionality of cheek teeth is essential for ruminants to masticate plant materials thoroughly and promote microbial degradation in their rumens. Thus, an excessive rate of tooth wear is expected to lead to premature loss of tooth functionality, and hence to reduced longevity. So far, however, the relationships between food habits, molar wear and longevity have not been investigated. We first compared molar wear rates among nine sika deer Cervus nippon populations with different food habits. We then investigated correlations between molar wear rate and two ecological factors, percentage of graminoids in diet and annual precipitation, relating to intrinsic and extrinsic abrasiveness of the ingested food, respectively. Secondly, we estimated 'retained molar durability' (molar height at a given age divided by wear rate) at successive ages for each population, and tested for correlation between molar durability and life expectancy among populations. The M 1 and M 3 wear rates differed among the populations and showed a positive correlation with graminoid consumption and a negative correlation with precipitation, suggesting that both ecological factors influence molar wear rates in the Japanese sika deer. M 3 durability had a stronger correlation with life expectancy than M 1 durability, especially at the older age stages. This implies that the influence of M 3 durability on life expectancy becomes stronger at the time when the M 1 is severely worn and loses its functionality, and is therefore more important for life span elongation than the M 1 . These results are concordant with the fact that the M 3 is the most hypsodont molar in many ungulates. In the Japanese sika deer, microevolutionary acquisition of hypsodonty appears to be the case in a northern population (the Kinkazan Island), whose molar wear rates are extremely rapid due to their food habits.

Morphological comparisons of the sika deer Cervus nippon mandible and molars were conducted between two (northern and southern) Japanese subspecific lineages and among local populations of different ('grazer' or 'intermediate feeder') feeding types. The northern lineage showed greater M 1 breadth, M 3 hypsodonty and mandibular corpus height than the southern lineage. Such differences were not observed between the 'grazer' and 'intermediate feeder' populations of the northern lineage. However, a northern population, which inhabits a particularly harsh environment (Kinkazan Island), had the largest values of relative molar size and hypsodonty, although this was not statistically significant. These results imply that, in the Japanese sika deer, the selective pressures acting on the current 'grazer' populations are not strong enough to bring out noticeable adaptive change in molar size and hypsodonty, but adaptive change in these traits may occur in an environment that promotes excessive molar wear, more than that seen in the current sika deer habitats of Japan. Combined with what is known of the Pleistocene history of the sika deer, we infer that the ancestral population of the northern Japanese lineage likely acquired their relatively larger and more hypsodont molars in an extremely harsh environment during the last or previous glacial periods.

No abstract

During the maintenance of the wild silkworm, Bombyx mandarina, a mutant phenotype exhibiting translucent skin was identified. Based on the crossing experiments with the domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori, we found that the mutant was controlled by molybdenum cofactor sulfurase (MoCoS) gene. We designated the mutant ''Ozaki's translucent'' (og Z ). We found a 2.1-kb deletion containing the transcription initiation site, exons 1 and 2, and the 5' end of exon 3 of the MoCoS gene. The transcript of the MoCoS gene was not detected in the og Z homozygote. We concluded that og Z is a complete loss-of-function allele generated by a disruption of the MoCoS gene.