Hasil untuk "Animal culture"

W. Marasas, T. Kellerman, W. Gelderblom et al.

Yangdong Pan, Xianglin Pu, Yifan Zhang et al.

Chicken coccidia can suppress the host immune response through CD4+CD25+ T cells, compromising the effectiveness of immune prophylaxis and potentially leading to immune failure. However, the role of chicken CD4+CD25+ T cells in chicken coccidia infection is not well understood. This study aimed to elucidate the immunomodulatory function of CD4+CD25+ T cells during Eimeria maxima infection and assess the impact of CD25+ cell depletion on immune response and infection outcomes. The study comprised three trials: (1) examining CD4+CD25+ T cells and cytokine changes post-E. maxima infection, (2) assessing the impact of in vitro CD25+ cell depletion on the immunomodulatory function of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and (3) evaluating the effects of in vivo CD25+ cell depletion on PBMC function and E. maxima infection. The results revealed that E. maxima infection significantly increased CD4+CD25+ T cell proportions in PBMCs and spleen, along with upregulated mRNA levels of IL-10, TGF-β and IL-4. In vitro CD25+ cell depletion enhanced PBMC proliferation as well as Th1, Th2 and Th17 response. In vivo CD25+ cell depletion partially disrupted E. maxima infection, as evidenced by reduced weight loss, alleviated intestinal lesions, lower oocyst shedding, and an anticoccidial index (ACI) exceeding 120. In conclusion, E. maxima infection upregulates CD4+CD25+ T cells along with their associated cytokines (IL-10 and TGF-β) and the surface molecule CTLA-4; and the depletion of CD25+ cells restores protective Th responses (Th1, Th2 and Th17), while blockade of CD25 in vivo mitigates the E. maxima infection process. This study demonstrates the immunomodulatory role of CD4+CD25+ T cells during E. maxima infection, providing key insights for elucidating the immune evasion mechanisms of this parasite.

Risa Shinoda, Nakamasa Inoue, Iro Laina et al.

Wildlife observation plays an important role in biodiversity conservation, necessitating robust methodologies for monitoring wildlife populations and interspecies interactions. Recent advances in computer vision have significantly contributed to automating fundamental wildlife observation tasks, such as animal detection and species identification. However, accurately identifying species from indirect evidence like footprints and feces remains relatively underexplored, despite its importance in contributing to wildlife monitoring. To bridge this gap, we introduce AnimalClue, the first large-scale dataset for species identification from images of indirect evidence. Our dataset consists of 159,605 bounding boxes encompassing five categories of indirect clues: footprints, feces, eggs, bones, and feathers. It covers 968 species, 200 families, and 65 orders. Each image is annotated with species-level labels, bounding boxes or segmentation masks, and fine-grained trait information, including activity patterns and habitat preferences. Unlike existing datasets primarily focused on direct visual features (e.g., animal appearances), AnimalClue presents unique challenges for classification, detection, and instance segmentation tasks due to the need for recognizing more detailed and subtle visual features. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate representative vision models and identify key challenges in animal identification from their traces. Our dataset and code are available at https://dahlian00.github.io/AnimalCluePage/

Laila Kazimierski, Guillermo Abramson, Nicolás Catalano

We describe the design and implementation of two low-cost, low-weight, radiotelemetry systems to measure the movement of small animals in a dense forest, where satellite positioning systems are unreliable and the attenuation of the vegetation poses several challenges. Both methods use stationary receiving stations that record the signal emitted by a portable transmitter carried by the animal. One of the methods measures the received power, while the other one registers the phase difference received by two-antennas stations. The later overcomes several difficulties that exist in the determination of the distance by the power method. We used our system to record the movement of Dromiciops gliroides, a vulnerable South American marsupial native of the Patagonian Andes, where it plays an important role in the ecosystem.

Rida Qadri, Aida M. Davani, Kevin Robinson et al.

Large language models are increasingly being integrated into applications that shape the production and discovery of societal knowledge such as search, online education, and travel planning. As a result, language models will shape how people learn about, perceive and interact with global cultures making it important to consider whose knowledge systems and perspectives are represented in models. Recognizing this importance, increasingly work in Machine Learning and NLP has focused on evaluating gaps in global cultural representational distribution within outputs. However, more work is needed on developing benchmarks for cross-cultural impacts of language models that stem from a nuanced sociologically-aware conceptualization of cultural impact or harm. We join this line of work arguing for the need of metricizable evaluations of language technologies that interrogate and account for historical power inequities and differential impacts of representation on global cultures, particularly for cultures already under-represented in the digital corpora. We look at two concepts of erasure: omission: where cultures are not represented at all and simplification i.e. when cultural complexity is erased by presenting one-dimensional views of a rich culture. The former focuses on whether something is represented, and the latter on how it is represented. We focus our analysis on two task contexts with the potential to influence global cultural production. First, we probe representations that a language model produces about different places around the world when asked to describe these contexts. Second, we analyze the cultures represented in the travel recommendations produced by a set of language model applications. Our study shows ways in which the NLP community and application developers can begin to operationalize complex socio-cultural considerations into standard evaluations and benchmarks.

Burak Satar, Zhixin Ma, Patrick A. Irawan et al.

Multimodal vision-language models (VLMs) have made substantial progress in various tasks that require a combined understanding of visual and textual content, particularly in cultural understanding tasks, with the emergence of new cultural datasets. However, these datasets frequently fall short of providing cultural reasoning while underrepresenting many cultures. In this paper, we introduce the Seeing Culture Benchmark (SCB), focusing on cultural reasoning with a novel approach that requires VLMs to reason on culturally rich images in two stages: i) selecting the correct visual option with multiple-choice visual question answering (VQA), and ii) segmenting the relevant cultural artifact as evidence of reasoning. Visual options in the first stage are systematically organized into three types: those originating from the same country, those from different countries, or a mixed group. Notably, all options are derived from a singular category for each type. Progression to the second stage occurs only after a correct visual option is chosen. The SCB benchmark comprises 1,065 images that capture 138 cultural artifacts across five categories from seven Southeast Asia countries, whose diverse cultures are often overlooked, accompanied by 3,178 questions, of which 1,093 are unique and meticulously curated by human annotators. Our evaluation of various VLMs reveals the complexities involved in cross-modal cultural reasoning and highlights the disparity between visual reasoning and spatial grounding in culturally nuanced scenarios. The SCB serves as a crucial benchmark for identifying these shortcomings, thereby guiding future developments in the field of cultural reasoning. https://github.com/buraksatar/SeeingCulture

Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki, Hamdy Mubarak et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently reflect the vast data distributions they encounter during their pre-training phase. As this data is predominantly sourced from the web, there is a high chance it will be skewed towards high-resourced languages and cultures, such as those of the West. Consequently, LLMs often exhibit a diminished understanding of certain communities, a gap that is particularly evident in their knowledge of Arabic and Islamic cultures. This issue becomes even more pronounced with increasingly under-represented topics. To address this critical challenge, we introduce PalmX 2025, the first shared task designed to benchmark the cultural competence of LLMs in these specific domains. The task is composed of two subtasks featuring multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): General Arabic Culture and General Islamic Culture. These subtasks cover a wide range of topics, including traditions, food, history, religious practices, and language expressions from across 22 Arab countries. The initiative drew considerable interest, with 26 teams registering for Subtask 1 and 19 for Subtask 2, culminating in nine and six valid submissions, respectively. Our findings reveal that task-specific fine-tuning substantially boosts performance over baseline models. The top-performing systems achieved an accuracy of 72.15% on cultural questions and 84.22% on Islamic knowledge. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning emerged as the predominant and most effective approach among participants, while the utility of data augmentation was found to be domain-dependent.

Sławomir Dadas, Małgorzata Grębowiec, Michał Perełkiewicz et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly proficient in processing and generating multilingual texts, which allows them to address real-world problems more effectively. However, language understanding is a far more complex issue that goes beyond simple text analysis. It requires familiarity with cultural context, including references to everyday life, historical events, traditions, folklore, literature, and pop culture. A lack of such knowledge can lead to misinterpretations and subtle, hard-to-detect errors. To examine language models' knowledge of the Polish cultural context, we introduce the Polish linguistic and cultural competency benchmark, consisting of 600 manually crafted questions. The benchmark is divided into six categories: history, geography, culture & tradition, art & entertainment, grammar, and vocabulary. As part of our study, we conduct an extensive evaluation involving over 30 open-weight and commercial LLMs. Our experiments provide a new perspective on Polish competencies in language models, moving past traditional natural language processing tasks and general knowledge assessment.

Enrico Gugliandolo, Bilal Mghili, Francesca Fabrizi et al.

This study examines the occurrence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics and heavy metals in Terra Nova Bay, a coastal area of the Ross Sea in Antarctica that is increasingly recognised as vulnerable to human influence. During the 37th Italian Antarctic Expedition (2021–2022), researchers collected seawater, sediment, and fish samples from the notothenioid species <i>Trematomus bernacchii</i> to evaluate microbial resistance in an environment once considered largely pristine. Fifty heterotrophic bacterial isolates were obtained and tested against twenty-eight antibiotics, revealing a notable presence of multidrug resistance. These multidrug-resistant isolates were then assessed for their tolerance to eight heavy metal salts to understand whether resistance traits extended beyond antimicrobials. Twelve isolates showing resistance to both antibiotics and metals were selected for further genetic screening, targeting key resistance genes linked to tetracycline, vancomycin, sulphonamides, and other antimicrobial classes. The detection of multiple resistance genes in genera such as <i>Pseudomonas</i>, <i>Pseudoalteromonas</i>, and <i>Psychrobacter</i> indicates that both natural selective pressures and local, human-related contamination may be shaping resistance patterns in this region. Overall, the study demonstrates that even remote Antarctic marine ecosystems can host bacteria with complex resistance profiles. While these ecosystems are largely isolated, human activities such as scientific research, tourism, and the introduction of pollutants may contribute to the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes, raising important ecological and potential public health considerations regarding the spread of resistance in polar environments.

Victor Temoche, Irene Acosta, Pablo Gonzales et al.

Goat production in the dry forest of northern Peru is essential for rural livelihoods but remains poorly characterized regarding its productivity and sustainability. This study used multivariate techniques—a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), principal component analysis (PCA), factor analysis of mixed data (FAMD), and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA)—to analyze data from 284 producers in Tumbes, Piura, and Lambayeque. Surveys captured 48 variables (41 qualitative, seven quantitative) on productivity, socioeconomics, and management. The MCA explained 22.07% of the variability in two dimensions, while the PCA accounted for 63.9%, focusing on productivity and diversification. The FAMD integrated these variables, explaining 51.12% of variability across five dimensions, emphasizing socioeconomic and management differences. The HCA identified three clusters: cluster 1 featured intensive systems with advanced management and commercial focus, cluster 2 included extensive systems limited by water scarcity, and cluster 3 reflected semi-intensive systems with irrigation and diversified production. These findings provide a detailed understanding of goat systems in northern Peru, identifying opportunities to improve resource use and tailor strategies to enhance sustainability. The multivariate analysis proved effective in capturing the complexity of these systems, supporting productivity and improving livelihoods in rural areas.

M. Sinclair, N. Lee, M. Hötzel et al.

Our perceptions shape our intentions, our motivations, our behavior, and in doing so, our reality. In this age of the Anthropocene, our perceptions also impact the lives and welfare of other animals. One of the key principles associated with the success of international animal welfare initiatives is an understanding of local audiences and contexts. Additionally, culture by country has been demonstrated to be a significant determinant of attitudes to animals and their welfare. Within this study, we surveyed 4,291 members of the general public on their perceptions of animals and animal welfare across 14 geographically and culturally diverse countries; Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Sudan, Thailand, United Kingdom and United States. For many countries included in this study, this constitutes the first time research of this nature has been conducted. Most participants across all countries agreed that the welfare of both farmed animals and companion animals was important to them, and that laws that protect that welfare were also important. The notion that humans always care more for companion animals in comparison to farmed animals is challenged, as is the notion that care for the welfare of animals is a trademark of highly developed nations alone. It is proposed that the utility of the animals, and proximity by way of exposure are more significant than companionship in some countries, particularly those that are engaged with subsistence farming. Important differences exist by country, and the findings have been presented within the context of each country, for ease of incorporation into localized strategy where suitable.

Jonathan Cook, Chris Lu, Edward Hughes et al.

Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information transmission. Despite its widespread success among humans, the capacity for artificial learning agents to accumulate culture remains under-explored. In particular, approaches to reinforcement learning typically strive for improvements over only a single lifetime. Generational algorithms that do exist fail to capture the open-ended, emergent nature of cultural accumulation, which allows individuals to trade-off innovation and imitation. Building on the previously demonstrated ability for reinforcement learning agents to perform social learning, we find that training setups which balance this with independent learning give rise to cultural accumulation. These accumulating agents outperform those trained for a single lifetime with the same cumulative experience. We explore this accumulation by constructing two models under two distinct notions of a generation: episodic generations, in which accumulation occurs via in-context learning and train-time generations, in which accumulation occurs via in-weights learning. In-context and in-weights cultural accumulation can be interpreted as analogous to knowledge and skill accumulation, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to present general models that achieve emergent cultural accumulation in reinforcement learning, opening up new avenues towards more open-ended learning systems, as well as presenting new opportunities for modelling human culture.

Carlos Toxtli, Christopher Curtis, Saiph Savage

Crowdsourcing markets are expanding worldwide, but often feature standardized interfaces that ignore the cultural diversity of their workers, negatively impacting their well-being and productivity. To transform these workplace dynamics, this paper proposes creating culturally-aware workplace tools, specifically designed to adapt to the cultural dimensions of monochronic and polychronic work styles. We illustrate this approach with "CultureFit," a tool that we engineered based on extensive research in Chronemics and culture theories. To study and evaluate our tool in the real world, we conducted a field experiment with 55 workers from 24 different countries. Our field experiment revealed that CultureFit significantly improved the earnings of workers from cultural backgrounds often overlooked in design. Our study is among the pioneering efforts to examine culturally aware digital labor interventions. It also provides access to a dataset with over two million data points on culture and digital work, which can be leveraged for future research in this emerging field. The paper concludes by discussing the importance and future possibilities of incorporating cultural insights into the design of tools for digital labor.

Shravan Nayak, Kanishk Jain, Rabiul Awal et al.

Foundation models and vision-language pre-training have notably advanced Vision Language Models (VLMs), enabling multimodal processing of visual and linguistic data. However, their performance has been typically assessed on general scene understanding - recognizing objects, attributes, and actions - rather than cultural comprehension. This study introduces CulturalVQA, a visual question-answering benchmark aimed at assessing VLM's geo-diverse cultural understanding. We curate a collection of 2,378 image-question pairs with 1-5 answers per question representing cultures from 11 countries across 5 continents. The questions probe understanding of various facets of culture such as clothing, food, drinks, rituals, and traditions. Benchmarking VLMs on CulturalVQA, including GPT-4V and Gemini, reveals disparity in their level of cultural understanding across regions, with strong cultural understanding capabilities for North America while significantly lower performance for Africa. We observe disparity in their performance across cultural facets too, with clothing, rituals, and traditions seeing higher performances than food and drink. These disparities help us identify areas where VLMs lack cultural understanding and demonstrate the potential of CulturalVQA as a comprehensive evaluation set for gauging VLM progress in understanding diverse cultures.

A. Jayanegara, F. Leiber, M. Kreuzer

W. Nicklas ( Convenor, P. Baneux, R. Boot et al.

Yoo-Bhin Kim, Jina Park, Yun-Ji Heo et al.

A feeding trial was conducted to investigate the effect of dietary supplementation of <i>Chlorella vulgaris</i> (CV) or <i>Tetradesmus obliquus</i> (TO) on laying performance, egg quality, and gut health indicators of laying hens. A total of 144 Hy-Line Brown laying hens aged 21 weeks were randomly assigned to one of three dietary treatments with eight replicates of six hens. Dietary treatments were as follows: CON, basal diet; CV, basal diet + 5 g <i>C. vulgaris</i>/kg of diet; TO, basal diet + 5 g <i>T. obliquus</i>/kg of diet. The results showed that diets supplemented with CV or TO had insignificant effects on laying performance, egg quality (i.e., Haugh unit and eggshell strength and thickness), jejunal histology, cecal short-chain fatty acids, and antioxidant/immune markers in ileal mucosa samples of laying hens. Compared with the control group, the egg yolk color score was higher (<i>p</i> < 0.05) in laying hens fed on diets containing CV and TO, although the former was a more intense yellow than the latter. Small intestinal lamina propria cells were isolated using flow cytometry to examine the percentages of immune cell subpopulations. Dietary microalgae did not affect B cells or monocytes/macrophages but altered the percentage of CD4+ T cells and CD8− TCR γδ T cells. Collectively, diets supplemented with <i>C. vulgaris</i> or <i>T. obliquus</i> can improve egg yolk color and would modulate host immune development and competence in laying hens.

Raiane Silva Miranda, Rogério Mendes Murta, Fredson Vieira e Silva et al.

Objetivou-se comparar o uso de dietas convencional, sem volumoso à base de milho íntegro ou milho íntegro hidratado em novilhos Angus x Nelore não-castrados confinados, tendo como variáveis analisadas o comportamento ingestivo, desempenho, parâmetros sanguíneos e características de carcaça. Foram utilizados 24 bovinos com média de 18 meses e com peso médio de 362,6 ± 22,3 kg, distribuídos em três tratamentos e mantidos em confinamento até o abate. Os animais foram alimentados ad libitum duas vezes ao dia de acordo com a respectiva dieta de cada tratamento e a duração do período experimental foi de 77 dias. Os animais do tratamento convencional apresentaram maior consumo médio de matéria seca (18,2 vs 10,1 vs 8,9 kg/dia para convencional, milho íntegro e milho íntegro hidratado, respectivamente). Não houve diferença estatística (P>0,05) para o ganho de peso diário e por período, rendimento de carcaças e cortes primários, pH e cobertura de gordura. As dietas sem volumoso alteraram o comportamento ingestivo, com redução do tempo de alimentação (3,59 vs 1,67 vs 1,60 h/dia) e ruminação (7,17 vs 1,37 vs 1,66 h/dia) e aumento do tempo de ócio (13,32 vs 21,03 vs 20,82h/dia) para os tratamentos convencional, grão de milho íntegro e grão de milho íntegro hidratado, respectivamente. Houve efeito significativo (P<0,05) para as concentrações séricas de ureia, proteínas totais e cortisol. Deste modo, dietas sem volumoso não alteram o desempenho e características de carcaça de novilhos Angus x Nelore, sendo uma alternativa à pecuária de corte.

O. A. Katsaraba, R. M. Sachuk, Ye. Ye. Kostyshyn et al.

Clinical studies were conducted in the treatment of hypofunction of the ovaries to increase the fertility of cows and heifers with the newly created drug “Surfadev” (solution for injections) in complex therapy. VLZ “Surfadev” (solution for injections). The drug stimulates the secretion of gonadotropins by the pituitary gland in a maximum of 2–3 hours after administration. The increased content of gonadotropins in the blood persists for 4–5 hours after administration. Unlike natural luliberin, the biological activity of the drug is 50 times greater, which allows the use of this drug in microdoses and short courses. The drug decomposes under the influence of enzymes more slowly than natural luliberin, which provides a stronger biological effect on the pituitary gland. “Devivit Complex” is a complex multivitamin preparation (Vitamins A, D3, E, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B12), which is used to correct and normalize metabolic processes in animals. Vitamins included in the preparation take part in biochemical processes in animal organisms (in the form of enzyme vitamins, hormone vitamins, antioxidants). When ovarian function is stimulated or corrected, 90.0 % of the treated animals show the arousal stage of the sexual cycle within 3–15 days, and their fertilization rate from the first insemination is 70.0 % on average. The high efficiency of using “Surfadev” in combination with “Devivit Complex” for ovarian hypofunction has been established. 83.3–95.6 % of the treated cows showed sexual desire, and the fertility from the first insemination reached 70.0 %. Further studies will be the next stage of pre-registration trials aimed at studying the effectiveness of the veterinary drug “Surfadev” (solution for injections) in complex therapy in the treatment of ovarian hypofunction and follicular cysts, which is mandatory material of the fourth part “Preclinical and clinical documentation” of the dossier for this medicine.

N.R.N. Cruz, M.R. André, T.G. Baraldi et al.

ABSTRACT Porcine hemoplasmosis is characterized as a geographically cosmopolitan disease caused by Mycoplasma suis and Mycoplasma parvum. Asymptomatic pigs are considered the focus of hemoplasmosis because they are carriers and reservoirs to new infections. This study aimed to determine the molecular occurrence of porcine hemoplasmas (PH) in the production cycle of technified farrow-to-finished swine herds. For this purpose, 20 swine herds were evaluated, where 501 whole blood samples were collected for qPCR and phylogenetic analyses for hemoplasmas. The epidemiological analysis was performed for the entire population and per the growth stage. The total prevalence for PH was 31.93% (161/501); 95% (19/20) of sampled herds were positive. The occurrence of PH by swine growth stages was nursery (30.47%), growing (31.29%), finishing (26.18%), and slaughter (40.25%). The quantification cycles (Cq) ranged from 3.18- 39.56 and the number of PH 16S rRNA copies per µL of DNA ranged from 5,57 x10-2 to 2.23 x1010. Sequencing and phylogenetic analysis of five selected samples showed 100% identity with M. parvum strain Indiana and two M. parvum sequences from Brazil/Goiás. This is the first report on PH in technified herds in Southeastern Brazil by growth stages.