Co-occurrence of three types of egg policing in the Norwegian wasp Dolichovespula norwegica

In insect societies, workers often try to challenge the reproductive monopoly of the queen by laying their own eggs. Successful worker reproduction, however, is frequently prevented by queen policing or worker policing, whereby either the mother queen or non-reproductive workers selectively kill worker-laid eggs. Recently, a third mechanism-""selfish"" worker policing-has also been described in which the workers selectively police worker-laid eggs but also lay eggs themselves. Here, we present results from the monogynous wasp Dolichovespula norwegica, which show that all three kinds of policing-queen policing, worker policing and ""selfish"" worker policing-co-occur. The net effect of these three kinds of policing collectively favoured the queen`s reproduction, as within 1 day 44% of the worker-laid eggs versus only 8% of the queen-laid eggs were eaten. Of the worker-laid eggs that were killed by workers, approximately two thirds were eaten by the reproductive workers even though these made up only a small proportion, 8%, of the work force. This means that policing workers obtained both direct fitness benefits as well as indirect (inclusive) fitness. In addition, we show that worker policing was carried out by a limited, specialised set of workers that was estimated to constitute approximately one quarter of the whole colony and of which 66% were non-reproductive.

Multimodos e múltiplas Representações, aprendizagem significativa e subjetividade: três referenciais conciliáveis da educação científica

A linha de pesquisa em multimodos e múltiplas representações vem atualmente sendo inspiradora de ações instrucionais na educação científica. Partindo dos fundamentos que justificam um encaminhamento didático à luz dessas referências, este trabalho procura mostrar que há compatibilidade dos seus fundamentos com a teoria da aprendizagem significativa de Ausubel e com as questões levantadas pelas pesquisas que indicam a necessidade de se considerar a subjetividade dos alunos presentes numa sala de aula. Essencialmente, procuramos argumentar que a promoção de um ensino por meio de multimodos e múltiplas representações é consistente com o ambiente plural das subjetividades existentes numa sala de aula e com uma aprendizagem significativa.

What Brazilian Portuguese Says about Control: Remarks on Boeckx & Hornstein

In an article in this journal, Boeckx & Hornstein (2006a) present data from Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as an argument in favor of the Movement Theory of Control (MTC). In this reply, I show that the data presented by those authors do not necessarily argue for a movement analysis of BP finite subjects nor of nonfinite control. I also show that BP provides arguments against the MTC when inflected infinitives are considered. Inflected infinitives may be used in BP in partial control structures, which makes it explicit that a singular matrix argument may control a syntactically plural null subject and shows that these two positions cannot be related by movement. Additionally, I show that the MTC makes the wrong predictions when a language with inflected infinitives is considered.