Background. Intense landscaping often alters the plant composition in urban areas. Knowing which plant species that pollinators are visiting in urban areas is necessary for understanding how landscaping impacts biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. The cave nectar bat, Eonycteris spelaea, is an important pollinator for many plants and is often recorded in human-dominated habitats. Previous studies of the diet of E. spelaea relied on morphological identification of pollen grains found in faeces and on the body of bats and by necessity disregarded other forms of digested plant material present in the faeces (i.e., plant juice and remnants). The main objective of this study was to examine the diet of the nectarivorous bat, E. spelaea, roosting in an urban cave at Batu Caves, Peninsular Malaysia by identifying the plant material present in the faeces of bats using DNA metabarcoding.
To evaluate genetic diversity of 20 genotypes of mungbean, an experiment was laid out in a Randomized Complete Block Design with two replications during the period from November, 2010 to February, 2011 at the experimental field of Genetics and Molecular Biology, Institute of Biological science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Eight morphological characters including plant height, number of fruiting branches per plant, number of pods per plant, number of pod clusters per plant, pod length, number of seeds per pod, 1000-seed weight and total seed yield per plant were measured. Analysis of variance showed significant differences among genotypes for all traits. A total of four groups were defined through cluster analysis and distinct genetic variations were observed among these groups. Using cluster analysis by unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) method, all genotypes were grouped into 3 main groups and 1 minor group. Cluster I consisted of 9 genotypes, cluster II of 7, cluster III of 1 and cluster IV of 3 genotypes. Principal component analysis was done to evaluate diversity and morphological traits which had more effects on diversity and three components explained near 79% of total variation among genotypes. By plot of first two components score for genotypes confirmed the result of cluster analysis.
The freshwater snakehead fish Channa striata is extensively distributed across tropical Africa and Asia. This fish becomes an important commodity in the aquaculture business that has been industrialized very fast over the last ten years. However, diseases brought economic loss to the industry estimated to be in billions. Although wild Channa striata are known to be highly resistant to diseases, the case under captivity may be different. For instance, an occurrence of selective mortality was found in a farm of Channa striata in Selangor, Malaysia. The etiology of the infection was attributed to a bacterium that belong to Enterobacteriaceae family. This family is known to be widely distributed in nature and was previously found to be involved in mortality of different fish species. Accordingly, 16S rRNA gene sequencing was used to identify bacteria isolated from skin and liver of moribund fish; the present research confirmed that the causative disease agent had been Enterobacter soli. To our best knowledge, it is the first to report this bacterium species as a disease causative agent in fish. Furthermore, clinical and histopathological changes of healthy fish samples were followed up applying the Koch's procedure.
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<p>Water and soil qualities play significant roles in the farming of giant freshwater prawn. The study evaluated water and soil qualities for giant freshwater prawn farming site suitability by using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) in Jelebu, Malaysia. The water quality parameters measured were biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, ammonia nitrogen, pH, dissolved oxygen, water temperature, total suspended solids, nitrite concentration and phosphate concentration, meanwhile soil qualities investigated were land use, slope, pH, texture, organic carbon and organic matter. Site suitability analysis can assist to identify the best location for prawn production. Specialist's opinions were used to rank the level of preference and significance of each of the parameter while the pairwise comparison matrix was applied to calculate the weight of each parameter for prawn farming. There are about 45.41% of the land was most suitable, 28.89% was moderately suitable while 25.69% was found unsuitable for prawn farming. The combination of AHP and GIS could give a better database and guide map for planners and decision-makers to take more rewarding decisions when apportioning the land for prawn farming, for better productivity.</p>
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