Hasil untuk "Animal culture"

A. Bradley, M. Evans, M. Kaufman et al.

A. Garibaldi, N. Turner

Ecologists have long recognized that some species, by virtue of the key roles they play in the overall structure and functioning of an ecosystem, are essential to its integrity; these are known as keystone species. Similarly, in human cultures everywhere, there are plants and animals that form the contextual underpinnings of a culture, as reflected in their fundamental roles in diet, as materials, or in medicine. In addition, these species often feature prominently in the language, ceremonies, and narratives of native peoples and can be considered cultural icons. Without these "cultural keystone species," the societies they support would be completely different. An obvious example is western red-cedar (Thuja plicata) for Northwest Coast cultures of North America. Often prominent elements of local ecosystems, cultural keystone species may be used and harvested in large quantities and intensively managed for quality and productivity. Given that biological conservation and ecological restoration embody human cultures as crucial components, one approach that may improve success in overall conservation or restoration efforts is to recognize and focus on cultural keystone species. In this paper, we explore the concept of cultural keystone species, describe similarities to and differences from ecological keystone species, present examples from First Nations cultures of British Columbia, and discuss the application of this concept in ecological restoration and conservation initiatives.

Simran Khanuja, Hongbin Liu, Shujian Zhang et al.

LLMs are deployed globally, yet produce responses biased towards cultures with abundant training data. Existing cultural localization approaches such as prompting or post-training alignment are black-box, hard to control, and do not reveal whether failures reflect missing knowledge or poor elicitation. In this paper, we address these gaps using mechanistic interpretability to uncover and manipulate cultural representations in LLMs. Leveraging sparse autoencoders, we identify interpretable features that encode culturally salient information and aggregate them into Cultural Embeddings (CuE). We use CuE both to analyze implicit cultural biases under underspecified prompts and to construct white-box steering interventions. Across multiple models, we show that CuE-based steering increases cultural faithfulness and elicits significantly rarer, long-tail cultural concepts than prompting alone. Notably, CuE-based steering is complementary to black-box localization methods, offering gains when applied on top of prompt-augmented inputs. This also suggests that models do benefit from better elicitation strategies, and don't necessarily lack long-tail knowledge representation, though this varies across cultures. Our results provide both diagnostic insight into cultural representations in LLMs and a controllable method to steer towards desired cultures.

Catherine Kokemuller, Ryan Guldenpfennig, Clare Hsu et al.

Olive extract (OE) has been used in human foods for its nutraceutical effects, making it a product of interest for pet food. However, OE’s effect on palatability has not been examined. The study objective was to evaluate the palatability of dry cat foods with OE applied at differing inclusions within liquid or dry palatants. Twenty-seven volatile compounds were identified by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry for a potentially earthy or fruit-like flavor profile. Liquid palatants were formulated to supply 0 (control), 15, 30, 50, 75, and 150 ppm OE, and dry palatants were formulated to provide 0, 100, 200, 400, and 600 ppm OE when coated onto kibble. Palatability was evaluated using two-day, two-bowl testing of OE-containing versus control rations in adult cats (<i>n</i> = 20) with two-tailed <i>t</i>-tests to determine if OE affected intake ratio (IR). The observed IR of rations with OE were 0.45 to 0.56. The only preference was the 200 ppm treatment (IR = 0.56; <i>p</i> = 0.01) while the other OE rations were not different from the control (<i>p</i> ≥ 0.05). These findings indicate that palatant formulations can supply kibble diets with up to 150 ppm OE for liquid and 600 ppm for dry applications without negatively impacting cat food palatability.

Jiyong Rao, Brian Nlong Zhao, Yu Wang

Multi-species animal pose estimation has emerged as a challenging yet critical task, hindered by substantial visual diversity and uncertainty. This paper challenges the problem by efficient prompt learning for Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models, \textit{e.g.} CLIP, aiming to resolve the cross-species generalization problem. At the core of the solution lies in the prompt designing, probabilistic prompt modeling and cross-modal adaptation, thereby enabling prompts to compensate for cross-modal information and effectively overcome large data variances under unbalanced data distribution. To this end, we propose a novel probabilistic prompting approach to fully explore textual descriptions, which could alleviate the diversity issues caused by long-tail property and increase the adaptability of prompts on unseen category instance. Specifically, we first introduce a set of learnable prompts and propose a diversity loss to maintain distinctiveness among prompts, thus representing diverse image attributes. Diverse textual probabilistic representations are sampled and used as the guidance for the pose estimation. Subsequently, we explore three different cross-modal fusion strategies at spatial level to alleviate the adverse impacts of visual uncertainty. Extensive experiments on multi-species animal pose benchmarks show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance under both supervised and zero-shot settings. The code is available at https://github.com/Raojiyong/PPAP.

Junyeong Park, Seogyeong Jeong, Seyoung Song et al.

Content moderation is a global challenge, yet major tech platforms prioritize high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages with scarce native moderators. Since effective moderation depends on understanding contextual cues, this imbalance increases the risk of improper moderation due to non-native moderators' limited cultural understanding. Through a user study, we identify that non-native moderators struggle with interpreting culturally-specific knowledge, sentiment, and internet culture in the hate speech moderation. To assist them, we present LLM-C3MOD, a human-LLM collaborative pipeline with three steps: (1) RAG-enhanced cultural context annotations; (2) initial LLM-based moderation; and (3) targeted human moderation for cases lacking LLM consensus. Evaluated on a Korean hate speech dataset with Indonesian and German participants, our system achieves 78% accuracy (surpassing GPT-4o's 71% baseline), while reducing human workload by 83.6%. Notably, human moderators excel at nuanced contents where LLMs struggle. Our findings suggest that non-native moderators, when properly supported by LLMs, can effectively contribute to cross-cultural hate speech moderation.

Aabid Karim, Abdul Karim, Bhoomika Lohana et al.

We demonstrate that large language models' (LLMs) mathematical reasoning is culturally sensitive: testing 14 models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Microsoft across six culturally adapted variants of the GSM8K benchmark, we find accuracy drops ranging from 0.3% (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to 5.9% (LLaMA 3.1-8B) when math problems are embedded in unfamiliar cultural contexts--even when the underlying mathematical logic remains unchanged. These statistically significant performance reductions (p < 0.01, confirmed through McNemar tests) reveal that mathematical reasoning in LLMs is not culturally neutral. To create these variants for Haiti, Moldova, Pakistan, Solomon Islands, Somalia, and Suriname, we systematically replaced cultural entities (names, foods, places, etc.) in 1,198 GSM8K questions while preserving all mathematical operations and numerical values. Our quantitative error analysis of 18,887 instances reveals that cultural adaptation affects broader reasoning patterns, with mathematical reasoning errors comprising 54.7% and calculation errors 34.5% of failures. Interestingly, cultural familiarity can enhance performance: Mistral Saba outperforms some larger models on Pakistan-adapted problems due to Middle Eastern and South Asian training data exposure. This study underscores the need for more diverse training data to ensure robust LLM performance across global contexts.

Mason Youngblood

The study of animal communication often involves categorizing units into types (e.g. syllables in songbirds, or notes in humpback whales). While this approach is useful in many cases, it necessarily flattens the complexity and nuance present in real communication systems. chatter is a new Python library for analyzing animal communication in continuous latent space using information theory and modern machine learning techniques. It is taxonomically agnostic, and has been tested with the vocalizations of birds, bats, whales, and primates. By leveraging a variety of different architectures, including variational autoencoders and vision transformers, chatter represents vocal sequences as trajectories in high-dimensional latent space, bypassing the need for manual or automatic categorization of units. The library provides an end-to-end workflow -- from preprocessing and segmentation to model training and feature extraction -- that enables researchers to quantify the complexity, predictability, similarity, and novelty of vocal sequences.

Zeyu Huang, Zuyu Xu, Yuanhao Zhang et al.

Scenic Live Streams (SLS), capturing real-world scenic sites from fixed cameras without streamers, have gained increasing popularity recently. They afford unique real-time lenses into remote sites for viewers' synchronous and collective engagement. Foregrounding its lack of dynamism and interactivity, we aim to maximize the potential of SLS by making it interactive. Namely MRSLS, we overlaid plain SLS with interactive Mixed Reality content that matches the site's geographical structures and local cultural backgrounds. We further highlight the substantial benefit of MRSLS to cultural heritage site interactions, and we demonstrate this design proposal with an MRSLS prototype at a UNESCO-listed heritage site in China. The design process includes an interview (N=6) to pinpoint local scenery and culture, as well as two iterative design studies (N=15, 14). A mixed-methods, between-subjects study (N=43, 37) shows that MRSLS affords immersive scenery appreciation, effective cultural imprints, and vivid shared experience. With its balance between cultural, participatory, and authentic attributes, we appeal for more HCI attention to (MR)SLS as an under-explored design space.

Sahya Maulu, Sandra Langi, O. J. Hasimuna et al.

The aquafeed industry continues to expand in response to the rapidly growing aquaculture sector. However, the identification of alternative protein sources in aquatic animal diets to replace conventional sources due to cost and sustainability issues remains a major challenge. Recently, insects have shown tremendous results as potential replacers of fishmeal in aquafeed. The present study aimed to review the utilization of insects in aquafeeds and their effects on aquatic animals' growth and feed utilization, immune response and disease resistance, and fish flesh quality and safety. While many insect species have been investigated in aquaculture, the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens), and the mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) are the most studied and most promising insects to replace fishmeal in aquafeed. Generally, insect rearing conditions and biomass processing methods may affect the product's nutritional composition, digestibility, shelf life and required insect inclusion level by aquatic animals. Also, insect-recommended inclusion levels for aquatic animals vary depending on the insect species used, biomass processing method, and test organism. Overall, while an appropriate inclusion level of insects in aquafeed provides several nutritional and health benefits to aquatic animals, more studies are needed to establish optimum requirements levels for different aquaculture species at different stages of development and under different culture systems.

Minha Ji, Matti Kiupel, Hyungjin Park et al.

Abstract A 14‐year‐old spayed female Miniature Pinscher presented with tongue curling, dysphagia, hypersalivation, and sublingual gland swelling. Comprehensive evaluation, including neurologic and musculoskeletal examinations, blood work, and urinalysis, revealed no abnormalities other than tongue‐related signs. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed a multilobed cystic structure in the occipito‐atlanto‐axial joint, compressing the right hypoglossal canal. The lesion appeared cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)‐like on T1‐weighted and T2‐weighted images, and hyperintense compared with CSF on fluid‐attenuated inversion recovery T2‐weighted images. The scans suggested mucinous content with enhanced peripheral areas on contrast‐enhanced images. Surgical removal and drainage of this cyst were performed, and clinical signs improved markedly. The dorsal cyst was tentatively diagnosed as a ganglion cyst based on histopathologic and imaging findings. Ganglion cysts should be considered in the differential diagnosis for dogs with similar MRI findings and neurologic signs.

Niloofar Jelokhani Niaraki, Shahram Jamshidi, Bahar Nayeri Fasaei et al.

Abstract Background Growing antibiotic resistance has made treating otitis externa (OE) increasingly challenging. On the other hand, local antimicrobial treatments, especially those that combine essential oils (EOs) with nanoparticles, tend to be preferred over systemic ones. It was investigated whether Ajwain (Trachyspermum ammi) EO, combined with chitosan nanoparticles modified by cholesterol, could inhibit the growth of bacterial pathogens isolated from OE cases in dogs. In total, 57 dogs with clinical signs of OE were examined and bacteriologically tested. Hydrogels of Chitosan were synthesized by self-assembly and investigated. EO was extracted (Clevenger machine), and its ingredients were checked (GC-MS analysis) and encapsulated in chitosan-cholesterol nanoparticles. Disc-diffusion and broth Micro-dilution (MIC and MBC) examined its antimicrobial and therapeutic properties. Results Staphylococcus pseudintermedius (49.3%) was the most common bacteria isolated from OE cases, followed by Pseudomonas aeruginosa (14.7%), Escherichia coli (13.3%), Streptococcus canis (9.3%), Corynebacterium auriscanis (6.7%), Klebsiella pneumoniae (2.7%), Proteus mirabilis (2.7%), and Bacillus cereus (1.3%). The investigation into the antimicrobial properties of Ajwain EO encapsulated in chitosan nanoparticles revealed that it exhibited a more pronounced antimicrobial effect against the pathogens responsible for OE. Conclusions Using chitosan nanoparticles encapsulated with EO presents an effective treatment approach for dogs with OE that conventional antimicrobial treatments have not cured. This approach not only enhances antibacterial effects but also reduces the required dosage of antimicrobials, potentially preventing the emergence of antimicrobial resistance.

Qing Qin, Chongyan Zhang, Mingxi Lan et al.

The ability to recognize the body sizes of sheep is significantly influenced by posture, especially without artificial fixation, leading to more noticeable changes. This study presents a recognition model using the Mask R-CNN convolutional neural network to identify the sides and backs of sheep. The proposed approach includes an algorithm for extracting key frames through mask calculation and specific algorithms for head-down, head-up, and jumping postures of Ujumqin sheep. The study reported an accuracy of 94.70% in posture classification. We measured the body size parameters of Ujumqin sheep of different sexes and in different walking states, including observations of head-down and head-up. The errors for the head-down position of rams, in terms of body slanting length, withers height, hip height, and chest depth, were recorded as 0.08 ± 0.06, 0.09 ± 0.07, 0.07 ± 0.05, and 0.12 ± 0.09, respectively. For rams in the head-up position, the corresponding errors were 0.06 ± 0.05, 0.06 ± 0.05, 0.07 ± 0.05, and 0.13 ± 0.07, respectively. The errors for the head-down position of ewes, in terms of body slanting length, withers height, hip height, and chest depth, were recorded as 0.06 ± 0.05, 0.09 ± 0.08, 0.07 ± 0.06, and 0.13 ± 0.10, respectively. For ewes in the head-up position, the corresponding errors were 0.06 ± 0.05, 0.08 ± 0.06, 0.06 ± 0.04, and 0.16 ± 0.12, respectively. The study observed that sheep walking through a passage exhibited a more curved knee posture compared to normal measurements, often with a lowered head. This research presents a cost-effective data collection scheme for studying multiple postures in animal husbandry.

Edith Hübner

In this note, we study an integral analogue of animated $δ$-rings: Animated $λ$-rings. We define animated $λ$-rings in terms of animated rings equipped with a structure of coherently compatible Frobenius lifts and show that the resulting $\infty$-category is obtained from animating the classical notion of a $λ$-ring. Our results build on the theory of animated $δ$-rings developed by Bhatt and Lurie in the context of prismatic cohomology.

Tuo Zhang, Tiantian Feng, Yibin Ni et al.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in understanding everyday content. However, their performance in the domain of art, particularly culturally rich art forms, remains less explored. As a pearl of human wisdom and creativity, art encapsulates complex cultural narratives and symbolism. In this paper, we offer the Pun Rebus Art Dataset, a multimodal dataset for art understanding deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. We focus on three primary tasks: identifying salient visual elements, matching elements with their symbolic meanings, and explanations for the conveyed messages. Our evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art VLMs struggle with these tasks, often providing biased and hallucinated explanations and showing limited improvement through in-context learning. By releasing the Pun Rebus Art Dataset, we aim to facilitate the development of VLMs that can better understand and interpret culturally specific content, promoting greater inclusiveness beyond English-based corpora.

Roberto Alejandro Mateos-Rocha, Karla Rosenda Cuevas Mendoza, Vianeth Méndez Cortés et al.

El proyecto se realizó con el objetivo de analizar la rentabilidad de establecer una granja de traspatio, para la comercialización de huevo de patio en la ciudad de Tuxpan, Veracruz, esto con el fin de ofrecer un producto fresco, de calidad y de precio accesible a los consumidores de la región. El área dónde se construyó la granja fue en la ciudad de Tuxpan, Veracruz, en la calle Ricardo Flores Magón número 8 de la colonia Universitaria, cerca de la facultad de ciencias biológicas y agropecuarias, campus Tuxpán. Se determinó por el concepto de “Granja de Traspatio” el cual es reconocido por manejar menor población de aves que una granja dividida en galpones. Para establecer la granja de traspatio se consideró la siguiente medida: 12 m2, se utilizaron postes de concreto para dar soporte y firmeza; se estableció una línea para tener energía eléctrica y poder brindar mayor comodidad a las aves en temperaturas elevadas con ventiladores y en temperaturas bajas con focos como fuente de calor. Se trabajó con un muestreo de población finita, donde el total de individuos del área de investigación fue de 154,600 habitantes, segmentados en un rango de edad de 20 a 64 años; en total se realizaron 119 encuestas de opción múltiple a personas pertenecientes al municipio de Tuxpan, Veracruz sin importar el sexo, solo se consideró la característica de ser el proveedor de alimentos de su hogar.

Sijing Wu, Yunhao Li, Weitian Zhang et al.

Singing, as a common facial movement second only to talking, can be regarded as a universal language across ethnicities and cultures, plays an important role in emotional communication, art, and entertainment. However, it is often overlooked in the field of audio-driven facial animation due to the lack of singing head datasets and the domain gap between singing and talking in rhythm and amplitude. To this end, we collect a high-quality large-scale singing head dataset, SingingHead, which consists of more than 27 hours of synchronized singing video, 3D facial motion, singing audio, and background music from 76 individuals and 8 types of music. Along with the SingingHead dataset, we benchmark existing audio-driven 3D facial animation methods and 2D talking head methods on the singing task. Furthermore, we argue that 3D and 2D facial animation tasks can be solved together, and propose a unified singing head animation framework named UniSinger to achieve both singing audio-driven 3D singing head animation and 2D singing portrait video synthesis, which achieves competitive results on both 3D and 2D benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significance of the proposed singing-specific dataset in promoting the development of singing head animation tasks, as well as the promising performance of our unified facial animation framework.

S.B. Little, G.F. Browning, A.P. Woodward et al.

Daily water use and wastage patterns of pigs have major effects on the efficacy of in-water antimicrobial dosing events when conducted for metaphylaxis or to treat clinical disease. However, daily water use and wastage patterns of pigs are not routinely quantified on farms and are not well understood. We conducted a prospective, observational 27-day study of the daily water use and wastage patterns of a pen group of 15 finisher pigs reared in a farm building. We found that the group of pigs wasted a median of 36.5% of the water used per day. We developed models of the patterns of water used and wasted by pigs over each 24-h period using a Bayesian statistical method with the brm() function in the brms package. Both patterns were uni-modal, peaking at 1400–1700, and closely aligned. Wastage was slightly greater during hours of higher water use. We have shown that it is feasible to quantify the water use and wastage patterns of pigs in farm buildings using a system that records and aggregates data, and analyses them using hierarchical generalised additive models. This system could support more efficacious in-water antimicrobial dosing on farms, and better antimicrobial stewardship, by helping to reduce the quantities of antimicrobials used and disseminated into the environment.

A.L. Kerwin, M.M. McCarthy, W.S. Burhans et al.

The objective was to evaluate a liver health index (LHI) by evaluating its association with negative health events, milk yield, and risk of pregnancy within 150 d in milk (DIM). In a retrospective cohort study, an LHI was calculated based on plasma albumin, cholesterol, and bilirubin concentrations for 265 primiparous and 611 multiparous cows 3 to 12 DIM enrolled across 72 farms in the northeastern United States. Mixed effects linear regression models were used to evaluate if (1) metritis (MET), (2) displaced abomasum (DA), (3) clinical ketosis (CK), (4) one or more of the 3 disorders (MET, DA, or CK), (5) 2 or more of the 3 disorders (MET, DA, or CK), or (6) culling within 30 DIM was associated with LHI. Mixed effects linear regression models were used to evaluate if LHI was associated with 305-d mature equivalent milk at the fourth test day (ME305; mean ± standard deviation: 114 ± 13 DIM) and a Cox proportional hazards model was used to evaluate if LHI was associated with pregnancy within 150 DIM. Cows that were diagnosed with MET, DA, CK, one or more of the disorders, 2 or more of the disorders, or were culled within 30 DIM had a lower LHI than cows that were not diagnosed with a disorder or culled. A 1-unit increase in LHI was associated with a 154 ± 38 kg increase in ME305 and a 8% increased risk of pregnancy within 150 DIM [hazard ratio (95% confidence interval): 1.08 (1.03 to 1.14)] for multiparous cows; however, we did not identify a relationship between LHI and ME305 or pregnancy within 150 DIM for primiparous cows. These results suggest that the LHI is associated with health, milk yield, and pregnancy within 150 DIM for multiparous cows and health for primiparous cows; therefore, the LHI can be used as a tool to evaluate transition cow success.

Wencan Ke, Huan Zhang, Shengnan Li et al.

This study evaluated the effects of hydrolysable tannin (HT) and condensed tannin (CT) on the bacterial community, fermentation quality, and proteolysis of alfalfa silage. Alfalfa was wilted to a dry matter (DM) of 35% fresh weight and ensiled with or without 4% HT or 4% CT. The application rates of tannins were based on fresh weight, and each treatment was ensiled in triplicate. After 60 d of fermentation, the CT-treated group had lower concentrations of ammonia nitrogen (NH₃-N) and free amino acid nitrogen (AA-N), but greater lactic acid concentration, than those in the control and HT-treated silage (<i>p</i> < 0.05). Compared to the control group, the application of tannins increased the abundance of <i>Pseudomonas</i> (negatively correlated with aminopeptidases activity), and decreased the abundance of <i>Pediococcus</i>—which was positively correlated with aminopeptidases activity—and the concentrations of non-protein nitrogen (NPN), NH₃-N, and AA-N. The application of HT decreased the abundance of <i>Lactobacillus</i> and increased the abundances of <i>Enterococcus</i>, while the opposite results were observed in the CT-treated group. The application of HT and CT reduced the proteolysis in treated silages, but the two were different in terms of their mechanism and their effects on the bacterial communities of the alfalfa silage.