Survey of anthelmintic resistance in Western Australian sheep flocks 1. Prevalence

Between July 1981 and December 1983, 116 randomly selected sheep farms in the south west of Western Australian were surveyed for resistance to anthelmintics. A faecal worm egg count reduction test was carried out on each farm. Anthelmintics tested were thiabendazole (44 mg/kg) and levamisole (7.5 mg/kg) given by intra-ruminal injection and comparisons were made with an untreated group on each farm. Successful tests were carried out on 84 farms and 68% of these had resistant worms present. The prevalence of thiabendazole resistant populations was for H. contortus 18%; Teladorsagia, 41% and Trichostrongylus, 48% and for levamisole resistant populations H. contortus, 10%; Teladorsagia, 41%; Trichostrongylus, 24%, and Nematodirus, 10%. Multiple resistant populations were found on 17% of farms. Although the distribution of nematode genera varied between the 400 to 750 mm and the greater than 750 mm rainfall zones there was no significant difference in the prevalence of resistance between zones. About one third of resistant populations were severely resistant (less than 60% reduction). It is likely that resistant worms were present on many farms without causing clinical disease and continued anthelmintic selection pressure will result in further development of resistance.     

Identification of a nonpathogenic Erwinia amylovora guaB mutant

A nonpathogenic Erwinia amylovora transposon mutant that has an insertion in the gua B gene was isolated. The mutation results in a nutritional requirement for guanine or xanthine, and loss of ability to produce ooze on immature pear fruit and to cause symptoms in the apple seedling assay. The mutant expressed other known virulence determinants including extracellular polysaccharide and had an intact hrp/dsp cluster. In addition it was able to grow in host tissue, although the population size in planta was maintained at a considerably lower level than that seen with the parent strain. The inability of the Erwinia amylovora gua B mutant to cause disease indicates that levels of guanine in plant tissue are likely to be insufficient to maintain optimal growth via the purine salvage pathway. This, in turn, appears to compromise the ability of the mutant to develop a sufficiently large population size in planta to overcome host defence mechanisms and cause disease symptoms. This indicates that a functional de novo guanine synthetic pathway is important for Erwinia amylovora to grow on plant tissue and cause disease.     

Seed banks of soils under vegetable cropping in England

Estimates of viable weed seeds in soil samples taken in 1968–1975 from 89 vegetable fields in England gave a median value of 4120 m^?2 in 0–15 cm. Poa annua, Stellaria media and Matricaria matricarioides occurred most frequently, and nine species accounted for 72% of all seeds found. The numbers of seeds were lower than those from a survey made a decade earlier but the species occurring most frequently were the same; M. matricarioides, however, appeared to have increased in relative importance.     

The Use of Large Scale Ridge and Furrow Landforms in Forestry Reclamation of Mineral Workings

Large scale (30 m wide x 1.5 m high) ridge and furrow landformsare commonly used in forest reclamation schemes in Britain toaid the removal of excess winter rainfall and improve rootingconditions. An investigation of soil physical and hydrologicalproperties in relation to tree growth at three sites where ridgeand furrows have been used has shown that this system largelysucceeded in producing land with reduced waterlogging. In wetterparts of the country this has promoted tree growth, probablybecause roots can exploit a greater depth of aerated soil. Inthe drier east, however, the higher parts of the ridges wereassociated with poorer tree growth because they suffered longperiods of large soil water deficits. The effect of droughtwas exacerbated by poor root systems, probably resulting fromhigh soil bulk densities. The results support the use of the ridge and furrow system inareas where rainfall is high and soil moisture deficits low,but suggest that a modified system of lower amplitude may bewarranted in drier areas. The study also reveals a need formore research on cultivation techniques to alleviate soil compaction.     

Individual automatic detection and identification of big cats with the combination of different body parts

The development of facial recognition technology has become an increasingly powerful tool in wild animal individual recognition. In this paper, we develop an automatic detection and recognition method with the combinations of body features of big cats based on the deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We collected dataset including 12 244 images from 47 individual Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) at the Siberian Tiger Park by mobile phones and digital camera and 1940 images and videos of 12 individual wild Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) by infrared cameras. First, the single shot multibox detector algorithm is used to perform the automatic detection process of feature regions in each image. For the different feature regions of the image, like face stripe or spots, CNNs and multi-layer perceptron models were applied to automatically identify tiger and leopard individuals, independently. Our results show that the identification accuracy of Amur tiger can reach up to 93.27% for face front, 93.33% for right body stripe, and 93.46% for left body stripe. Furthermore, the combination of right face, left body stripe, and right body stripe achieves the highest accuracy rate, up to 95.55%. Consequently, the combination of different body parts can improve the individual identification accuracy. However, it is not the higher the number of body parts, the higher the accuracy rate. The combination model with 3 body parts has the highest accuracy. The identification accuracy of Amur leopard can reach up to 86.90% for face front, 89.13% for left body spots, and 88.33% for right body spots. The accuracy of different body parts combination is lower than the independent part. For wild Amur leopard, the combination of face with body spot part is not helpful for the improvement of identification accuracy. The most effective identification part is still the independent left or right body spot part. It can be applied in long-term monitoring of big cats, including big data analysis for animal behavior, and be helpful for the individual identification of other wildlife species.