In animals, reproductive behaviors serve to attract individuals together during the
breeding season and to coordinate the behavioral and physiological states of individuals
so that mating can successfully occur. In snakes, the various reproductive behaviors
including courtship, mating, courtship inhibition, male combat and trailing are mediated
primarily by pheromones. Pheromones...
Pheromones are chemical cues produced by organisms that affect the behavior and/or physiology of conspecifics. The orchestration of reproductive behaviors in many animals depends on the expression of sex pheromones. In insects, intraspecific variation in sex pheromone expression is commonly observed and often influences social interactions between individuals. To what...
Carnivores have disproportionate effects in ecological systems but understanding their exact influences on ecosystems is a matter of great complexity and debate. Predators directly impact prey by killing them, and indirectly by modifying their behavior in response to predation risk. Yet how species interact, both among members of a carnivore...
This study compared the effects of two conditions on
the motor development of preschool children and
investigated the relationship between preschool children's
motor development and perceived competence. Specifically,
it provided information for discerning: a) the relative
effects of a sensory-motor condition and an unstructured
activities condition on the motor development...
Ecosystems are facing increasing threats from human related activities, such as overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, species invasions, and diseases, among others. While oceanic islands provide natural laboratories to understand ecological and evolutionary process, they are also particularly vulnerable to these impacts, given their usual isolation from the mainland and the...
The sinking of the RMS Titanic has achieved a difficult feat – it has remained culturally relevant. The dedication of the general public to understanding Titanic is evident in many avenues of popular and consumer culture. For those individuals who did not get enough of the 1997 Titanic movie, there...
In this dissertation, the structure and electronic properties of multiple metal oxide thin films are characterized and presented. Prompt inorganic condensation (PIC) of metal-oxo and –hydroxo clusters was evaluated as a technique for making metal oxide clusters in two separate studies. The first focuses on the synthesis of lithium niobate...
How complex traits evolve continues to be a major focus of evolutionary
investigation. A current topic of debate is the hypothesis that the phenotypic
integration of complex traits gives rise to evolutionary constraints. I studied two color
traits in the common garter snake, Thamnophis sirtalis, that show a high level...
Haiti is far from achieving the UN goal of sanitation access for all; 20% Haitians have no sanitation access, and less than 0.1% of urban excreta is safely managed. Container-Based Sanitation (CBS) may be a key tool for achieving equitable sanitation coverage in Haiti’s cities. CBS is a sanitation strategy...
Surface characterization of materials is widely utilized over a range of disciplines and essential to the development of new materials, technology, or processes. Metal oxide nanoclusters have shown promise as potential new generation photoresist materials for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) nanolithography. Organotin clusters have been proposed as potential candidates for resist...