Pecking Orders Research Articles

Formation of the Pecking Order during Small-Scale Floor Feeding in Helmeted Guinea Fowl (Numida meleagris).

Helmeted guinea fowl are social animals and only males form a hierarchy in the wild. Non-cage husbandry systems benefit the reproductive health of guinea fowl; however, there are concerns that the feeding duration of subordinate individuals is insufficient. Here, the pecking orders formed during small-scale floor feeding were investigated. There were three experimental categories: male-only (four males), female-only (four females), and mixed category (two males, two females). Each experimental category was set up three times and included different individuals. Behaviors were recorded for 130 h 52 min, 89 h 11 min, and 98 h 46 min in the male, female, and mixed categories, respectively. Male helmeted guinea fowls pecked other males, whereas females exhibited little pecking behavior. Male pecking behavior was not homogeneous within each experimental group. It has been suggested that males form a pecking order, whereas females have no hierarchy under small-scale floor-feeding conditions, as observed in the wild. In most cases, on the first day the number of pecking behaviors was low 20 min after the start of the experiment. The three subordinate individuals in the mixed category had little time to feed, whereas the other birds in the mixed category and all helmeted guinea fowl in the male- and female-only categories had longer feeding durations. We suggest that helmeted guinea fowl may be reared under small-scale floor feeding, and that the health of males should be managed. However, rearing females and males under small-scale floor feeding conditions should be avoided. This study contributes to improving the welfare of helmeted guinea fowl reared under small-scale floor feeding.

Interaction Between the Cage Floor and the Variation of Different Fur Colors the Behavior and Against Perfomans of Kampung Super Chickens (Gallus domesticus Sp)

The Super Kampung chicken has a non-uniform coat color, this is related to the genetics of its parents. Genetics has a relationship with aggressiveness and this must be supported by a supportive cage floor. This study aims to examine the effect of the interaction between variations in coat color and different types of cage floors. The experimental material used was 120 DOC which were maintained for 70 days. This study used a completely randomized design (CRD) with a 5x2 factorial pattern with 10 treatments, namely 5 coat colors (W) and 2 cage floors (L), the treatments were repeated 3 times so there were 40 experimental units. The results showed that there was an interaction between the color of the coat and the type of floor of the cage on the pecking order variable. Color variation had a very significant (P<0.01) effect on roaming behavior, but had no significant effect (P>0.05) on pecking order behavior, feed conversion and performance index. The cage floor treatment had no significant effect (P>0.05) on all variables. The conclusion of this research is genetic such as genes (SORCS2) will be related to the level of aggressiveness. So that there are interactions of these two factors to the intensity behavior of pecking and pecking orders.

Coup in the coop: Rank changes in chicken dominance hierarchies over maturation

Chicken dominance hierarchies or pecking orders are established before maturation and maintained by consistent submissive responses of subordinate individuals, leading to stable ranks within unchanged groups. We observed interactions of 418 laying hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) distributed across three small (20) and three large (∼120) groups. The observations were performed before sexual maturation (young period) and additionally after onset of maturation (mature period) to confirm stability of ranks. Dominance ranks were estimated via the Elo rating system across both observation periods. Diagnostics of the ranks revealed unexpected uncertainty and rank instability for the full dataset, although sampling appeared to be adequate. Subsequent evaluations of ranks based on the mature period only, showed more reliable ranks than across both observation periods. Furthermore, winning success during the young period did not directly predict high rank during the mature period. These results indicated rank changes between observation periods. The current study design could not discern whether ranks were stable in all pens before maturation. However, our data rather suggested active rank mobility after hierarchy establishment to be the cause for our findings. Once thought to be stable, chicken hierarchies may provide an excellent system to study causes and implications of active rank mobility.

A comprehensive review on bio-stimulation and bio-enhancement towards remediation of heavy metals degeneration

Pollution of heavy metals is one of the risky contaminations that should be managed for all intents and purposes of general well-being concerns. The bioaccumulation of these heavy metals inside our bodies and pecking orders will influence our people in the future. Bioremediation is a bio-mechanism where residing organic entities use and reuse the squanders that are reused to one more form. This could be accomplished by taking advantage of the property of explicit biomolecules or biomass that is equipped for restricting by concentrating the necessary heavy metal particles. The microorganisms can't obliterate the metal yet can change it into a less harmful substance. In this unique circumstance, this review talks about the sources, poisonousness, impacts, and bioremediation strategies of five heavy metals: lead, mercury, arsenic, chromium, and manganese. The concentrations here are the ordinary strategies for bioremediation such as biosorption methods, the use of microbes, green growth, and organisms, etc. This review demonstrates the toxicity of heavy metal contamination degradation by biotransformation through bacterioremediation and biodegradation through mycoremediation.

Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction.

Hot-headed peckers: thermographic changes during aggression among juvenile pheasants (Phasianus colchicus).

In group-living vertebrates, dominance status often covaries with physiological measurements (e.g. glucocorticoid levels), but it is unclear how dominance is linked to dynamic changes in physiological state over a shorter, behavioural timescale. In this observational study, we recorded spontaneous aggression among captive juvenile pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) alongside infrared thermographic measurements of their external temperature, a non-invasive technique previously used to examine stress responses in non-social contexts, where peripheral blood is redirected towards the body core. We found low but highly significant repeatability in maximum head temperature, suggesting individually consistent thermal profiles, and some indication of lower head temperatures in more active behavioural states (e.g. walking compared to resting). These individual differences were partly associated with sex, females being cooler on average than males, but unrelated to body size. During pairwise aggressive encounters, we observed a non-monotonic temperature change, with head temperature dropping rapidly immediately prior to an attack and increasing rapidly afterwards, before returning to baseline levels. This nonlinear pattern was similar for birds in aggressor and recipient roles, but aggressors were slightly hotter on average. Our findings show that aggressive interactions induce rapid temperature changes in dominants and subordinates alike, and highlight infrared thermography as a promising tool for investigating the physiological basis of pecking orders in galliforms. This article is part of the theme issue 'The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies'.

On the 10th anniversary of JISIB: Reflection on academic tribalism

On the 10th anniversary of JISIB: Reflection on academic tribalism

Investigating Interdisciplinary Practice: Methodological Challenges (Introduction)

Investigating Interdisciplinary Practice: Methodological Challenges (Introduction)

Ecological drift and competitive interactions predict unique patterns in temporal fluctuations of population size.

Recent studies have highlighted the importance of higher-order competitive interactions in stabilizing population dynamics in multi-species communities. But how does the structure of competitive hierarchies affect population dynamics and extinction processes? We tackled this important question by using spatially explicit simulations of ecological drift (10 species in a homogeneous landscape of 64 patches) in which birth rates were influenced by interspecific competition. Specifically, we examined how transitive (linear pecking orders) and intransitive (pecking orders with loops) competitive hierarchies affected extinction rates and population dynamics in simulated communities through time. In comparison to a pure neutral model, an ecological drift model including transitive competition increased extinction rates, caused synchronous density-dependent population fluctuations, and generated a white-noise distribution of population sizes. In contrast, the drift model with intransitive competitive interactions decreased extinctions rates, caused asynchronous (compensatory) density-dependent population fluctuations, and generated a brown noise distribution of population sizes. We also explored the effect on community stability of more complex patterns of competitive interactions in which pairwise competitive relationships were assigned probabilistically. These probabilistic competition models also generated density-dependent trajectories and a brown noise distribution of population sizes. However, extinction rates and the degree of population synchrony were comparable to those observed in purely neutral communities. Collectively, our results confirm that intransitive competition has a strong and stabilizing effect on local populations in species-poor communities. This effect wanes with increasing species richness. Empirical assemblages characterized by brown spectral noise, density-dependent regulation, and asynchronous (compensatory) population fluctuations may indicate a signature of intransitive competitive interactions.

The odyssey of becoming: Professional identity and insecurity in the Canadian accounting field

Abstract What does it mean to be a professional in accounting? Drawing on a comprehensive set of empirical materials, this paper provides a rich account of how accountants made sense of their professional identities in the context of the unification of three Canadian accounting associations. In a sharp contrast to what prior studies have examined in terms of knowledge, personal trait, and presentationalism, this paper reveals that professional identity is often construed by accountants in terms of self-privileged standing in perceived social pecking orders (identity ranking) and in terms of professional life journey (identity experiencing). Self-privileged standing is about how one is positioned and compared with others; professional life journey, on the other hand, entails not just the past but also the future and is laden with cognition, meanings, and emotions. These two aspects of professional identity are co-constitutive and feed each other for accountants’ identity work, in which the sense of professional security (or insecurity) plays an important role. This paper in its totality highlights the dynamic, fluid nature of professional identity. But more importantly, this paper points to the problematic hollowing out of the very meaning of the term “professional” in the accounting field.

International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy

International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy

Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain. Elizabeth Yale. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii+346.

Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain. Elizabeth Yale. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii+346. Consider this depiction of “An Antiquary” offered by John Earle (ca.1600–1665), bishop of Salisbury: “A great admirer he is of the rust of old Monuments. … Printed bookes he contemnes, as a novelty of this latter age; but a Manu-script he pores on everlastingly, especially if the cover be all Moth-eaten, and the dust make a Parenthesis between every Syllable.”1 Written before some of the people in the book under review were born, Earle’s caricature catches aspects of their behavior, but only superficially. Men such as Elias Ashmole, John Aubrey, Anthony Wood, Edward Lhuyd, John Evelyn, and Robert Plot cannot be fully captured by the label “antiquary,” in part because their interests embraced natural history, and also because they did not work alone, as Earle implied. They were linked by correspondence in intellectual collaboration, using both manuscript and print.

Impeccable Characters—and The Politics of Stardom

Rankings of screen acting from inside the Hollywood industry reflect the fickle pecking orders regarding the status and popularity of stars as time goes by. Gregory Peck is an illustrative and rewa...

The Fragility of Individual-Based Explanations of Social Hierarchies: A Test Using Animal Pecking Orders.

The standard approach in accounting for hierarchical differentiation in biology and the social sciences considers a hierarchy as a static distribution of individuals possessing differing amounts of some valued commodity, assumes that the hierarchy is generated by micro-level processes involving individuals, and attempts to reverse engineer the processes that produced the hierarchy. However, sufficient experimental and analytical results are available to evaluate this standard approach in the case of animal dominance hierarchies (pecking orders). Our evaluation using evidence from hierarchy formation in small groups of both hens and cichlid fish reveals significant deficiencies in the three tenets of the standard approach in accounting for the organization of dominance hierarchies. In consequence, we suggest that a new approach is needed to explain the organization of pecking orders and, very possibly, by implication, for other kinds of social hierarchies. We develop an example of such an approach that considers dominance hierarchies to be dynamic networks, uses dynamic sequences of interaction (dynamic network motifs) to explain the organization of dominance hierarchies, and derives these dynamic sequences directly from observation of hierarchy formation. We test this dynamical explanation using computer simulation and find a good fit with actual dynamics of hierarchy formation in small groups of hens. We hypothesize that the same dynamic sequences are used in small groups of many other animal species forming pecking orders, and we discuss the data required to evaluate our hypothesis. Finally, we briefly consider how our dynamic approach may be generalized to other kinds of social hierarchies using the example of the distribution of empty gastropod (snail) shells occupied in populations of hermit crabs.

Hierarchy in practice: Multilateral diplomacy and the governance of international security

AbstractIn today’s world, a significant portion of international security politics is conducted through multilateral channels, often from the halls of international organisations such as the United Nations or NATO. This article theorises and empirically documents the production, reproduction, and contestation of local diplomatic hierarchies that practitioners often call ‘international pecking orders’. According to conventional wisdom in IR, the sources of international hierarchies are primarily structural, stemming from the interstate distribution of (material) capabilities. Yet the growing prevalence of multilateral diplomacy in the governance of international security generates distinctive forms of social stratification organised around a struggle for diplomatic competence. As they pursue their instructions and manage security politics, state representatives posted to international organisations make use of the opportunities and constraints of a given situation and compete for rank through the display of practical know-how. The article illustrates this process by looking at how a key set of multilateral practices lend themselves to pecking order dynamics, fromesprit de corpsto reporting through brokering. By taking the multilateralisation of security politics seriously, the article shows that international hierarchy, far from an unobservable reality, is actually part of parcel of each and every practice that makes the world go round.

Patterns of Capital Structure in Indian Private Corporate Sector: A Study on Indian Banks and Steel Industry

The paper presents an analysis of patterns of capital structure of Indian private corporate sector. The patterns in Indian private corporate sector has been analysed by taking two industries from BSE 500 listed companies from twenty six industries for the period of 1999-2000 to 2012-13. The panel data for sources and uses of fund of steel and banking industries have been used to develop an empirical result for patterns followed by Indian private corporate sector. The findings of the study suggest that Pecking orders theory is not applicable to Indian private corporate sector. It also analyses the impact of financial recession of 2007 on financing pattern by applying chow test for panel data.

Preserving 'Debt Capacity' or 'Equity Capacity': A Dynamic Theory of Security Design under Asymmetric Information

We model a firm in which early investors are less informed than insiders, but better informed than new investors about the firm's prospects. This allows early investors to dictate terms in new financing rounds. They monetize on this power by steering the firm towards issuing equity. Anticipating adverse selection and underinvestment in future financing rounds, firms optimally engage in relationship financing through debt-like contracts and building up equity capacity. Long-term credit lines are an alternative only for small and less uncertain investments. Our results highlight the different financing pecking orders in firms dependent on relationship lending and venture capital financing.

Review: The Mess they Made

THE MESS THEY MADE The Middle East After Gwynne Dyer Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. 267pp, $21.99 paper (ISBN 0771029802)Gwynne Dyer, a journalist and columnist, attempts to analyze all prominent issues and actors in current state of affairs in Middle East and makes future predictions about (Iraq in particular). More than half of Dyer's book is dedicated to an analysis of in one way or another. The reasons that George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq, political and security situation in Iraq, future of Iraq, and impact of war on Iran's policy are discussed in separate chapters that are short but free of repetition. The remaining chapters address other major issues in Middle East, including radical Islamist terrorism, Iran's nuclear policy, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and post-Taliban Afghanistan. These latter chapters are more informative than former ones, although experts on Middle East will find little original analysis and many debatable points.The basic premise of book on is that Bush administration (they) has created a mess in country and lost war. The surge (a pathetic escalation) is not working and is unlikely to work (87). As a result, author predicts that United States will leave immediately after end of Bushs term because of the implosion of public opposition to war. In author's view, a US withdrawal from will be largely a positive development for Iraq-in long term at least-because presence of America is root cause of postwar difficulties in country.What this implies for larger Middle East is not clear in book. Dyer argues that declining US influence in Middle East following its anticipated withdrawal from coupled with the by destruction of Iraq will upset status quo in (2). Nowhere in book, however, are the unleashed by war specified. It is not Shi'ite because author argues that such a revival is largely exaggerated. It is not Islamist extremism and terrorism it breeds because they are not immediate consequences of war but responses to a century of foreign domination and manipulation of region (3). It is certainly not democratic forces in Arab countries which are either weak or virtually absent.Equally problematic is fact that author does not substantiate his alarmist description of Middle East since US invasion of Iraq. He writes in introduction that Everything is now up for grabs [in Middle East]: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even 1918 borders themselves might change (2). In fact, in rest of book, such a picture does not emerge. Aside from prospect of an independent Iraqi Kurdistan and an Islamicized Iraq, author fails to tell us which regimes and pecking orders are likely to change. …

Crackpots on the Roof

America! HeviEW Jones continuedfrom previous page like the wind. The poem's self-reflexivity does not indulge solipsism . Instead, its iconographie focus on the "I" as alternately arrow, plunger, bird, and tree, and its marking the lyric "I" and reader's "eye" as "no sanctuary," signal an engagement in the poem's materiality as a shifting linguistic process. It also anticipates the language-based work of the contemporary African American poet Ruth Ellen Kocher. Kocher's recent poem "Issues Involving Interpretation " is replete with imaged text and imagined subtext that echoes Jordan's: The word has no life of its own despite what the writer tells you. Behind the sword is no quivering hand worn into life's hilt, no arm swaying the wind in dying movement. There is only the word, sword. Outside, the trees live without language And tip toward whatever sun manages. . . . But there is no tree in this poem, only The word, tree. There is no speaker who Entreats you to imagine the tree standing.... Delineating the apparent associations between Jordan 's and Kocher's verses highlights another strength of Every Goodbye Ain't Gone's diverse selections. As the editors assert, its promise rests as much in its "break from established disciplinary modes, a break from regnant pecking orders, a break through," as it lies in the connectivity it intimates between current African American artists' creative ventures and earlier modes of linguistic and poetic innovation. Such links to our contemporary literary moment help make the book fruitful for both the lay and academic reader, for the aficionado of African American literature and the specialist in the field. It enables the editors to reach their stated aim, to "shift our historical comprehension of African American poetry in recentdecades and our anticipations ofcritical comprehensions to come." For instance, Percy Johnston's "Lexington Avenue Express" recalls, through its transitory omnipotence and outreach, a Whitmanian past pushed through the urban and urbane present, as the speaker faces "The patriarch of every jukebox" and announces, "I / Become the Lexington Avenue Express; I walk through / Myself even as I stop at every local station from Woodlawn to 125th." Contemporary readers may appreciate the typographically stylized signatures by contributor Rusell Atkins's concretist "the L__ L L" with its "Un _______/ ouNOUN/ /" as a literary historical context for Harris's opening composition in "Drag": "/-?/-?/-?/- /--." No poet or critic has the last word on what constitutes a black aesthetic. Every Goodbye Ain't Gone contains nearly two hundred poems by thirty-eight contributors who published, according to the editors, "avant-garde, black poetics from the decades following the Second World War." The volume's heft seems lightened only by the comparatively slim ratio of women poets included , which the editors point out is double that of "the most broadly influential anthology representing the Black Arts Movement," LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal's Black Fire (1968). Some ofthe gender disproportion reflects, we learn, "the difficulty in securing poems from all of the potential contributors [they] approached." "Still," they hasten to emphasize, It is important to recognize that the proportions of male and female contributors in published collections during the time period we here survey was typified by the numbers we see in Black Fire. Surely this is not to say that many more women artists weren't actively pursuing the more adventurous avenues of poetic composition . . . . Rather, it is a sign of the barriers that still existed in a literary world dominated by men. One of the most important things we can do today is to recognize the importance ofthose such as Jayne Cortez, Elouise Loftin, Gloria Tropp, and June Jordan who broke a path for the many women who were to come after them, the remarkable next generation ofwomen artists whose work will reappear in the next installment of this [anthology] project. Judging by the quality of this meticulously researched anthology — in once popular books that have long been out of print, in journals and magazines that are now archival treasures, in library special collections catalogues and private authors's papers—Nielsen and Ramey's current offering will likely garner a diverse readership's anticipation of their future project. To paraphrase the avant...

2005 SSSR Presidential Address: On Being a Community of Scholars—Practicing the Study of Religion

Given the opportunity to address this Society, I have chosen to reflect on the work we do together, especially as that work is displayed in our annual gathering. This gathering, like many of the events we study, is a ritual that intensifies and celebrates the “profane” work we do in “ordinary time.”1 It identifies us to others and to ourselves. And occasionally it allows us to see ourselves in a new light. From scattered locations around the globe, many know us only through our journal, but others—from time to time—participate in the fall meeting that renews and develops the intellectual and social world that defines our work. I have been a participant observer in these meetings for longer than I like to think about, and I have seen folkways worthy of any obscure cultural group. There are the initiation rituals of neophytes who have to deliver their first paper when they have just learned that their intellectual hero (or nemesis) is sitting in the back row. There are the magical rites performed by scholars who are sure that 20 pages can be delivered in 10 minutes. And there are the pecking orders that can be observed in hallway greetings.2 Exploring those folkways might be quite amusing, but my goal here is to take a step back to ask what all those rituals signify—Why does this group gather at all and what does this ritual occasion reveal about how the group is being transformed? In asking how we are being transformed, I have to confess to an agenda. Both in the observations that follow and in the form they take, I hope to embody and facilitate some of those changes. To state my hope quite clearly—the vitality of this community of scholars will best be fostered by bringing diverse perspectives to a common task. The form of this essay (and of the address on which it is based) is therefore intentional. I asked four friends to help me in reporting on the rituals of this gathering and in reflecting on the identity those rituals celebrate. While each is well-versed in the literatures behind the ideas they are presenting, I asked them to focus especially on what was presented at the meetings instead. Each of them is newer in this “tribe” than I and brings fresher ears to the task, and they represent diverse research interests and diverse ethnic identities. All of us are convinced that no single observer can stand alone to declare what is true about the world. We will come closer to understanding who we are by listening to multiple voices.