Female entrepreneurship in rural Vietnam: an exploratory study

Deterrence policies and asylum seekers: the case of Australia

The basic tenets of the international refugee protection regime, set out in the UN's 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol, grant individuals the right to seek asylum, but do not provide for laws obliging signatory states to grant asylum. This inherent paradox allows signatory states ongoing manoeuvre to prevent would-be asylum seekers from accessing protection in their territories. To this end, countries of the global north have designed and implemented a range of measures aimed at deterring onshore asylum seekers - privileging border control over refugee protection. This paper examines the effectiveness of deterrence measures taken by Australia. It argues that deterrence measures and attendant political rhetoric are not only contrary to international humanitarian obligations, but obscure empirically grounded understandings of forced migration as a complex social phenomenon, and as such are problematic in terms of meeting their publicly stated objectives of stopping on-shore asylum seeking in the long term.

Relationship between long-term environmental fluctuations and diving effort of female Australian fur seals

For predators foraging within spatially and temporally heterogeneous marine ecosystems, environmental fluctuations can alter prey availability. Using the proportion of time spent diving and foraging trip duration as proxies of foraging effort, a multi-year dataset was used to assess the response of 58 female Australian fur seals Arctocephalus pusillus doriferus to interannual environmental fluctuations. Multiple environmental indices (remotely sensed ocean colour data and numerical weather predictions) were assessed for their influence on inter-annual variations in the proportion of time spent diving and trip duration. Model averaging revealed strong evidence for relationships between 4 indices and the proportion of time spent diving. There was a positive relationship with effort and 2 yr-lagged spring sea-surface temperature, current winter zonal wind and southern oscillation index, while a negative relationship was found with 2 yr-lagged spring zonal wind. Additionally, a positive relationship was found between foraging trip duration and 1 yr-lagged spring surface chlorophyll a. These results suggest that environmental fluctuations may influence prey availability by affecting the survival and recruitment of prey at the larval and post-larval phases while also affecting current distribution of adult prey.

Early-developmental stress, repeatability, and canalization in a suite of physiological and behavioral traits in female zebra finches

Adaptive developmental plasticity allows individuals experiencing poor environmental conditions in early life to adjust their life-history strategy in order to prioritize short-term fitness benefits and maximize reproductive output in challenging environments. Much research has been conducted to test whether such adoption of a "faster" life-history strategy is accompanied by concordant changes in behavior and physiology, with mixed results. As research in this field has focused on comparison of mean-level responses of treatment groups, few studies include repeated measures of response variables and the effect that developmental stress may have on repeatability per se. We investigated how early-developmental stress affects the mean expression of (and repeatability in) a variety of behavioral and physiological traits in female zebra finches. We predicted that: (1) individuals subjected to nutritional restriction in the nestling phase would have higher feeding and activity rates, with associated increases in hematocrit and basal metabolic rates (BMRs), (2) nutritional restriction in early life would alter adults' stress-induced corticosterone level, and (3) developmental stress would, respectively, influence the amount of among-individual and within-individual variation in behavioral and physiological traits, hence affecting the repeatability of these traits. In comparison to control females, stressed females did not differ in activity rate or stress-induced corticosterone level, but they did have higher levels of feeding, hematocrit, and BMR. Among-individual variance and repeatability were generally higher in stressed females than in controls. Finally, we found that developmental dietary restriction significantly reduced the amount of within-individual variance both in activity rate in the novel environment and in stress-induced corticosterone level. Our results not only confirm previous findings on the effect of early-developmental stress on BMR, but also extend its effect to feeding rate and hematocrit, suggesting that developmental plasticity in these traits is ontogenetically linked. Early-developmental stress may disable particular genetic canalizing processes, which would release cryptic genetic variation and explain why repeatability and among-individual variance were generally higher in the stressed groups than in controls. For activity rate in the novel environment and with stress-induced corticosterone level, however, early-developmental stress significantly reduced within-individual variance, which may be a consequence of increased canalization of these traits at the micro-environmental level.

Different male vs. female breeding periodicity helps mitigate offspring sex ratio skews in sea turtles

 The implications of climate change for global biodiversity may be profound with those species with little capacity for adaptation being thought to be particularly vulnerable to warming. A classic case of groups for concern are those animals exhibiting temperature-dependent sex-determination (TSD), such as sea turtles, where climate warming may produce single sex populations and hence extinction. We show that, globally, female biased hatchling sex ratios dominate sea turtle populations (exceeding 3:1 in >50% records), which, at-a-glance, reiterates concerns for extinction. However, we also demonstrate that more frequent breeding by males, empirically shown by satellite tracking 23 individuals and supported by a generalized bio-energetic life history model, generates more balanced operational sex ratios (OSRs). Hence, concerns of increasingly skewed hatchling sex ratios and reduced population viability are less acute than previously thought for sea turtles. In fact, in some scenarios skewed hatchling sex ratios in groups with TSD may be adaptive to ensure optimum OSRs.