Unfamiliar Landscapes Research Articles

Arsenyev, Vladimir K Jonathan C. Slaght (review)

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 776 Arsenyev, Vladimir K. Across the Ussuri Kray: Travels in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains. Translated with annotations by Jonathan C. Slaght. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2016. xxvii + 454 pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $35.00: £28.99 (paperback). The books of the Russian explorer and naturalist V. K. Arsen´ev have commanded a loyal Russian readership since they were first published in the 1920s. The detailed accounts of his expeditions in the Russian Far East, which he led whilst serving as an officer in the tsarist army in the years before the 1917 Revolution, appealed to a readership mesmerised by descriptions of the exotic inhabitants and unfamiliar landscape of the remote taiga. The popular success of the 1975 Soviet film, Dersu Uzala, loosely based on the life of one of the Nanai (Goldi) hunters who accompanied Arsen´ev on some of his travels, reflected the continuing fascination exercised by the idea of wilderness on audiences across the world. Arsen´ev’s books were not published in full during the Soviet period. The censorship took issue with some of the author’s views even during the comparatively liberal 1920s (Arsen´ev was deemed to practise non-Marxist science and was perhaps fortunate to die a natural death before the purges of the 1930s). The handful of English translations of Arsen´ev’s books were inevitably based on the abridged Soviet versions and, perhaps surprisingly, have never made much of an impact beyond Russia. ThistranslationbythebiologistJonathanSlaght,whohimselfworksinRussia’s Far East, is based on the full 1921 Russian text of Arsen´ev’s Across the Ussuri Kray (itself first published in Russian a decade ago). The two useful introductory essays — by Slaght himself and by Ivan Yegorchev of the Society for the Study of the Far East — provide the reader with helpful background information both about Arsen´ev and the vexed history of his books. A comparison of the texts with Arsen´ev’s own field journals shows that he was inclined on occasion to alter the sequence of events in his books in order to improve the narrative. He did not, for example, meet Dersu Uzala until his 1906 expedition, although the Nanai hunter makes an appearance here in Arsen´ev’s description of his earlier 1902 visit to Lake Khanka on the Russo-Chinese border. Nor was Arsen´ev content to limit himself to a purely scientific discussion of the flora and fauna he found in the Russian wilderness that lay between the Chinese border and the Sea of Japan. Metaphors and similes recur through the text. Rows of trees are likened to a ‘long colonnade’ (p. 16) and ‘a tangled mess of birds’ to a ‘spider’s web’ (p. 41). Feeling for the ‘beauty of nature’ survives the hardships of travel across the taiga (p. 106). The appeal of Arsen´ev’s writings to generations of readers has, indeed, partly rested on the fact that he was more than a simple chronicler of the things he saw on his travels. Both the narrator and his subjects — whether human or non-human — are a vivid presence in his books. REVIEWS 777 Arsen´ev’s penchant for a quasi-Romantic language is most striking in his description of Dersu Uzala himself, who emerges from the text as an almost Rousseauian figure, a primitive man untouched by the corruption of city life. Across the Ussuri Kray contains numerous descriptions of the hunter’s ability to follow invisible tracks and predict weather patterns long before they have become apparent to others less in tune with nature. Arsen´ev also details Dersu’s description of animals and inanimate objects as ‘people’, doubtless an echo of a native spiritual tradition that had no sense of a binary division between human beings and the world around them. The Russian describes how Dersu repeatedly left provisions at rest-places for those who might follow him, evidence of a spontaneous morality based on an instinctive fellow-feeling for others faced with the dangers of the forest, albeit in a remote setting where strangers are as likely to be dangerous as sympathetic. Arsen´ev’s description of the complex ethnic mosaic...

Review: Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation

Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago 15 September–31 December 2016 The sober yet expectant atmosphere of a rich archive, brimming with objects that point to numerous riveting stories, greeted visitors to this exhibition at the Graham Foundation. An array of documents were displayed within austere spaces, mostly photographs by Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji, curated from his extensive collection previously deposited at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut (now at MIT) (Figure 1). The photographs, amassed by Chadirji over several decades, capture his design work from 1952 to 1978, alongside various aspects of Iraq's cultural life—rituals, crafts, and spaces—as well as his social circle and travels. The stark presentation of the images suggested a minimum mediation between the archive and the visitor, giving the intricate details, enigmatic figures, and unfamiliar landscapes a striking impact. Figure 1 Installation view of Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation , Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, 2016 (photo by RCH | EKH). The selection for this exhibition—focused primarily on architectural projects and urban scenes—was similar to that for the first iteration of the show at Columbia University's Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, held earlier the same year, but filled a larger space at the Graham Foundation's Madlener …

Explaining the origin of fluting in North American Pleistocene weaponry

Clovis groups, the first widely successful colonizers of North America, had a distinctive technology, whereby manufacturers removed flakes to thin the bases of their stone projectile points, creating “flutes.” That process is challenging to learn and costly to implement, yet was used continent-wide. It has long been debated whether fluting conferred any adaptive benefit. We compared standardized models of fluted and unfluted points: analytically, by way of static, linear finite element modeling and discrete, deteriorating spring modeling; and experimentally, by way of displacement-controlled axial-compression tests. We found evidence that the fluted-point base acts as a “shock absorber,” increasing point robustness and ability to withstand physical stress via stress redistribution and damage relocation. This structural gain in point resilience would have provided a selective advantage to foragers on a largely unfamiliar landscape, who were ranging far from known stone sources and in need of longer-lasting, reliable, and maintainable weaponry.

Skirting or Courting Controversy? Chinese FDI in Latin American Extractive Industries

China has become a key player in the development sector in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), not only due to trade but also because of the growing scope and visibility of its foreign direct investments (FDI). However, Chinese investments in the region are far from homogeneous, not only oscillating over time and space, but also varying across modes of incorporation into LAC economies. In the extractive industries, Chinese actors rely on a wide gamut of strategies to open up markets and to help ensure access to oil and minerals. This chapter breaks down the concept of FDI into three umbrella categories—greenfield projects, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures—to analyse how Chinese capital enters LAC extractive sectors. The chapter argues that, faced with a relatively unfamiliar landscape and new sources of uncertainty, Chinese companies tend to ‘test the water’ through mergers and acquisitions, as well as joint ventures, before delving into greenfield activities like direct mining or drilling. This cautious approach signals a degree of institutional learning on the part of Chinese stakeholders, as well as the desire to avoid charges of neo-colonialism, imposed dependency, and lax adherence to formal regulations.

Mangroves – Captured By The Keen Eye Of A 17th Century Landscape Painter

Artists and scientists alike came across unfamiliar landscapes and strikingly strange fauna and flora when they embarked for the ‘colonies’. In the 17th and 18th centuries curiosity for the exotic developed into direct scientific observation, which is often still appreciated scientifically today, such as in biological taxonomy. Often observation, interpretation and reporting were geared towards functional aspects, a resourcist view on the environment in the wake of the colonial enterprise. This entailed that focus could be biased towards aspects of mercantile, political or strategic interest. Landscape vision is no exception for the possible biases. The Dutch painter Frans Post during his 7 year stay in the New World (Brazil) in the 17th century was the first to depict mangroves as a very characteristic tropical vegetation, unfamiliar to Europeans, in spite of its limited interest in the context of colonial economy. He did this in the strong and developing tradition of Dutch landscape painting.

Lost in space? Considering young men as drivers of urban informal settlement risk

In today’s rapidly urbanising world, young people from poor socio-economic backgrounds are becoming increasingly marginalised. Young men in particular are adapting to very mobile forms of existence. Navigating complex and unfamiliar urban landscapes, they must constantly interpret and adapt to changing circumstances in order to survive. Living in shifting informal urban environments, they have of necessity developed survival strategies and new behaviours, drawing on traditional beliefs combined with new urban experiential knowledge. However, while women and children are generally considered most vulnerable to the growing levels of risk associated with everyday life in densely-settled informal urban settlements, the particular vulnerabilities of the itinerant young men who live there have generally been disregarded or at best are poorly understood. This presents a critical gap in our understanding of urban risk in South Africa. Answering to a research imperative that seeks to understand the nature of the mobility of young black South African men living in informal settlements, and the vulnerabilities associated with their fluid and generally insecure livelihoods, this paper contributes a new perspective to current understandings of urban risk, presenting a review of key bodies of literature and relevant theoretical debates drawn from disparate disciplinary perspectives.

We Are Not in Kansas Anymore: The Unfamiliar Landscape of NASH

1Section of Digestive DiseasesYale UniversityNew HavenCT *Address reprint requests to: Wajahat Z. Mehal, M.D., D.Phil., Section of Digestive Diseases, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520‐8019. E‐mail: [email protected]; fax: 1‐203‐785‐7273.

Book Review of The New Digital Shoreline: How Web 2.0 and Millennials are Revolutionizing Higher Education

In higher education, the integration of new technologies and pedagogies of instruction is often a source of apprehension. The New Digital Shoreline , written by Roger McHaney of Kansas State University, is a guide for understanding millennial learners along with current technologies and strategies used in college classrooms. The audience for this book would likely be faculty and administrators with limited knowledge of the shifting expectations for technology in higher education. On the spectrum of technology adoption ranging from innovators to laggards, The New Digital Shoreline is best suited for late majority adopters. The book is organized around the metaphor of exploring a new world, one with an unfamiliar population, landscape, and culture; the author is your guide on a journey to successfully adapt to the realities of this new world.

타슈켄트 서울공원 설계과정에서 구현된 한국정원 설계요소 고찰

서울시와 우즈베키스탄(Uzbekistan)의 수도 타슈켄트(Tashkent)시는 2010년 7월에 자매도시협정을 맺고, 타슈켄트 내에 서울공원을 조성하기로 결정하였다. 이후 이를 위한 현상 설계 공모를 2012년 치렀으며, 이때 당선된 작품을 기반으로 하여 2014년 6월 준공 후, 같은 해 9월에 개장하였다. 본 연구에서는 현상 설계 당시의 고민에서부터 아이디어가 실제 설계에 반영되어 준공되기까지 제 전반의 사항들을 한국정원 설계요소들을 중심으로 살펴본다. 타슈켄트 서울공원은 단순히 타슈켄트 내의 공공 공원으로서의 역할을 넘어 해외에 조성된 한국 전통 정원의 새로운 효시가 될 수 있는 곳으로 조성코자 하는데 주안점을 두었다. 지금까지 외국에 조성된 한국정원과 공원들이 대부분 조선시대에 초점을 맞추어 재현했던 한계를 벗어나, 타슈켄트 서울공원은 17만 명 고려인들이 우즈베키스탄에 머무르고 있는 것을 감안하여 옛 고려의 문화와 정취를 느낄 수 있는 공간이 될 수 있도록 하였다. 선행 연구를 통해 한국성 재현을 위한 디자인 요소들을 도출하였으며, 여기에는 고려시대의 정원 요소뿐 아니라, 고려인들 외에 현지인들이 보편적인 한국 전통정원을 체험할 수 있도록 조선시대의 재현 요소들도 재해석하여 함께 설계에 반영하였다. 중앙아시아에 한국의 전통미와 서정성이 담긴 공간을 구현하여 타슈켄트시 현지인들에게 우리문화의 단아하고 소박한 풍경을 느끼도록 하였다. 서울공원의 스토리텔링의 공간경험은 두 가지 시점으로 전개된다. 첫째, 고려인과 외국인의 시점으로 전개되는 공간경험으로써, 서정적이고 다원적인 공간구조를 지나면서 체험하는 경관의 단서들을 통해 고향, 한국의 정취를 더듬어 나가는 연속적 경관 체험의 장이다. 둘째, 타슈켄트 시민을 비롯한 이방인들의 시점에서 전개되는 경험으로써, 낯선 경관에서 느끼는 새로움, 지형과 경관을 다루는 다양한 기법 및 자세를 읽고, 과거 실크로드를 통해 동아시아와 교역을 이루었던 것처럼 한국정원에서 한국문화와 교감을 하며, 우리의 정서를 느끼는 스토리텔링과정으로 설정하였다. 외국도시에 조성되는 한국정원 및 공원은 단순한 조경공간으로서의 의미를 넘어, 외국인들에게 대한민국의 이미지와 '한국'의 문화를 널리 알리는 첨병 역할을 한다. 타슈켄트 서울공원 역시 이를 통해 대한민국과 수도서울의 이미지를 쉽게 알릴 수 있도록 한국 전통조경의 아름다움과 독창성을 반영하여 설계하였다. 더불어 우즈베키스탄 경관과의 차별성을 나타낼 수 있는 디자인, 현지인들에게 한국문화를 알릴 수 있는 계획안을 도출하는데 중점을 뒀다. 타슈켄트 서울공원은 현 시점에서 외국에 조성된 '한국정원'의 가장 최근 사례이다. 따라서 이에 대한 설계 전략과 내용에 대한 연구를 통해 외국 도시에 조성되고 있는 한국정원에서의 한국성의 재해석 과정과 설계 요소 도출에 대한 고민과 과정을 살펴볼 수 있으리라 사료된다. Tashkent Seoul Park was completed in June, 2014, following the signing of a sisterhood relationship between Seoul City and Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan in July, 2010. An open competition for the design of the park was held and, based on the design, the park was completed in June and open to the public in September, 2014. Tashkent Seoul Park is more than a public park in Tashkent. The focus was on making it a starting point for offering a new model for traditional parks of Korea built abroad. Korean gardens and parks built in overseas cities are not only a landscape space but also serve as an ambassador that promotes the culture of Korea to foreigners who are unfamiliar with Korean culture. Therefore, Tashkent Seoul Park was designed to reflect the beauty and uniqueness of Korean traditional landscaping to promote the image of Korea and Seoul. As such, the design and plan was focused on the best measures to make known Korean culture through a design that sets itself apart from the landscape of Uzbekistan. To date, Korean parks or Seoul parks that have been built overseas have focused on the re-enactment of gardens and parks during the Josun Dynasty era. But with the Tashkent Park, the process of the 170,000 people from Goryeo was also reflected onto the design so that the culture and sensibilities of old Goryeo could be felt as well. Korean traditional garden design elements for the representation of the Korean identity are taken from the pilot study. This design element includes not only that of Goryeo, but also the Josun Dynasty era to allow local people to experience a general Korean traditional garden. The traditional beauty and lyricism of Korea was presented to Central Asia through the park in Tashkent so that the citizens could feel the simple yet down-to-earth beauty of Korean aesthetics. As such, the spatial experience of story-telling in Seoul Park evolves from two points of view. First, it is a spatial experience from the perspective of the Goryeo period and of foreigners. It is a continuum of a landscape experience where one can trace the sentiments of Korea and a hometown in Korea by passing through lyrical and multi-faceted spatial structures. Second, it is an experience that evolves from the viewpoint of an outsider, including the Tashkent citizens. It allows visitors to read the various methods and attitudes in an unfamiliar landscape and terrain. Through a story-telling that is reminiscent of the Silk Road through which trade with East Asia took place, visitors can interact with Korean culture in the Korean Garden and throughout the process they can feel the very Korean sentiments. This park presents the latest example of a 'Korean Garden' formed overseas and thus presents a clue to understanding the representation pattern of the Korean aspects of Korean Gardens through a study on the design strategies.

Experimental effects of habitat type on the movement ecology and stopover duration of spring migrant Northern Waterthrushes (Parkesia noveboracensis)

Long-distance migratory animals typically stop-over between migratory movements to rest and refuel. In species lacking stopover site fidelity, including most songbirds, timely arrival to breeding areas with sufficient energy stores for reproduction requires that migrants rapidly locate suitable stopover habitat in unfamiliar landscapes. Few studies have examined movement ecology in such species during stopover, and even fewer have addressed how these migrants adjust movement behaviors in response to encountering preferred or non-preferred habitats. We experimentally translocated spring transient Northern Waterthrushes (Parkesia noveboracensis) to preferred (bottomland) and non-preferred (upland) forest habitats and characterized subsequent fine-scale movements and stopover duration using radiotelemetry. Minimum stopover duration averaged 4.1 days and was 1.5 days longer in bottomland-released birds than in upland-released birds. Minimum stopover duration decreased by 1.4 days per week over the spring migratory period. For upland-released and bottomland-released birds, respectively, maximum distance moved from the release point was 635 ± 58 m and 326 ± 51 m on the day of the release and 773 ± 109 m and 504 ± 83 m on the following day. Upland-released individuals traveled nearly twice as far from the release point on day 1 as bottomland-released birds. Upon reaching bottomland habitats within 2.0 ± 0.3 h of release, subsequent distance moved on day 1 by upland-released birds was similar to that of bottomland-released birds. Cumulatively, these results indicate that initial exploratory movements were facultative and habitat dependent and that waterthrushes can successfully locate suitable stopover habitats in a heterogeneous landscape at the spatial scales we investigated.

Field operations: necessary transgressions

Standing on the bridge of an enormous container ship, watching Hong Kong harbour emerge blinking out of a South China Sea pregnant with ships and into the radar screen dawn as we approach nearby Chinese port of Yantian … barrelling along a dirt road tracing oil pipes through the Ecuadorean Amazon atop the roof rack of a minivan, the gas flares of oil refineries visible over jungle canopy … passing a bar of solid metal more valuable than a London house and less useful than a brick between eager hands in the Gold Room of an Australian Outback mine … Standing in a chilled and humming room with the supercomputer ‘Pac-man’ as it crunches climate change data … Feeling the bass wave rumble from a rocket launch at a space city in the Kazakh Steppe … Breathless at 5,000m as a radio array turns gracefully to face the beginnings of the universe … We are in the field. These are sites built from stories. Unfamiliar landscapes forged from familiar wants and needs. They are landscapes and infrastructures as cultural artefacts. Each ripe with its own absurdities and contradictions, and each born of a critical mass of habits, beliefs, and desires.

Moss Rooms and Hell Holes: the landscape of the Leyland Dispute Maps, 1571–1599

ABSTRACTLarge-scale local maps are rare before the eighteenth century, so for one small district in the north-west of England to have seven such maps dating from the end of the sixteenth century is remarkable. These maps were produced in connection with land disputes heard before the Court of the Duchy of Lancaster and depict a mossland landscape where the absence of natural boundary markers, and a history as an intercommon rather than in single ownership, readily led to disputes between notably litigious neighbouring resident landlords; while the hearing of the cases in Westminster, rather than before local juries, generated the need for the maps themselves, to help the court understand this unfamiliar landscape. By definition single-purpose ephemeral objects, the maps nevertheless often contained more information than was strictly necessary for the case in hand and so were sometimes brought forward by the courts or copied by the litigants for reuse in later suits. The maps today can be regarded as texts which throw considerable light on, and help us to reconstruct, a lost landscape of living sphagnum moss, peat diggings and seasonal grazings, which at the time was regarded as typifying Lancashire but which has since entirely disappeared from the county, and indeed from England as a whole.The maps restore to us a district name, Wymott, lost since the seventeenth century; and they capture a landscape in transition, as the thinner peats were becoming exhausted and as much of the district was becoming enclosed, drained and converted to farmland.

The three lives of a uniface

Three different sorts of unifacial stone tool allometric patterns – representing three different sorts of flake design and exploitation patterns – are used to consider the role landscape familiarity plays in producing variability in hunter–gatherer lithic technologies. It had been previously hypothesized that colonizers' unifacial tools (on the population level) should possess the design property of longevity because as people travel in unfamiliar landscapes they could not be certain of encountering new stone outcrops to replenish their stock. Previous analyses of Clovis unifacial tools were consistent with this hypothesis and showed the first allometric pattern, namely that larger tools possessed flatter, less spherical shapes than the smaller tools, suggesting Clovis foragers exploited the retouch potential afforded by the larger, flatter blanks. Here, we hypothesized that the design property of longevity in unifacial tools would be less important to non-colonizing post-Clovis foragers because they would have been more familiar with environments and stone outcrop locations, and thus better able to tailor their unifacial tools to habitat-specific functional and scheduling requirements. Operationally, this lack of concern with tool longevity would be demonstrated by a second or third allometric pattern, namely that there is no relationship between tool size and shape, or that larger tools are rounder than smaller tools. We tested this prediction with analyses of 435 unifacial stone tools from several post-Clovis groups in vastly different environments, including Parkhill (Great Lakes), Folsom (Rocky Mountains), and Cody/Alberta (High Plains). Regardless of whether the post-Clovis dataset was examined in its entirety or by individual cultures, no iteration of the analyses exhibited an allometric pattern similar to the Clovis one. Overall, these results suggest that landscape familiarity plays a significant role in hunter–gatherer unifacial stone tool technological organization.

Visual meaning-making in an underprivileged neighbourhood landscape: milieus and atmospheres

By bringing together the spatially oriented ‘milieu’ and ‘atmosphere’ approach with the method of self-generated photo elicitation, this visual essay examines the possibility of the mediation of new meanings in urban neighbourhood representation and spatial organization. The milieu/atmosphere relationship offers a methodological background for visual communication in landscape, where, besides common and conscious interpretations, expression is given to non-graspable, sometimes inexplicable internal atmospheric experiences that have great potential to shift acknowledged understandings and interpretations of landscape aesthetics. A reflexive self-generated photo elicitation is introduced to bringing into communication unfamiliar atmospheric visual landscape experiences. This method is used in the underprivileged parts of the Kopli neighbourhood of North-Tallinn, Estonia. Some of the participants’ representations were handled as atmospheric pictures, which, although different from the acknowledged milieu approach, brought into communication the milieu character of a strong neighbourhood.

“La mise en scène du journal crypté de l’écriture”: The Theater of Noëlle Renaude

Noëlle Renaude has been writing plays for 25 years now; her work is staged regularly in Paris and in the rest of France, and has been translated into many languages. She is one of the most experimental and innovatory writers for the contemporary French stage. Her plays systematically question and dismantle the generic conventions. In her most recent plays, she attempts to stage the writing body and the body of writing by experimenting with the page framed on the computer screen, testing all the possibilities of what can happen within the space of the frame, and questioning what happens when the frame is transgressed, when words—and characters—disappear over the edge. By staging words untethered from characters and by drawing on the resources of a range of genres within the space of the play text—cinema, novel, poem—Renaude questions what it means to inhabit language in the twenty-first century. The plays present significant challenges to actors and directors, dispensing as they do with all of the conventions of character distribution, plot and setting. It is only by getting to work on the text with the breath, the voice, the body, that the reader/actor will discover the secret diary of the writing process inscribed in the text—its moods, its tones, its breakdowns, its exultations. On Renaude’s stage, we wander in unfamiliar landscapes and feel (again) the terror of the threshold, the in-between of sound and sense, orality and textuality. In this essay, Noonan examines some of Renaude’s most recent plays in order to consider their relationship with the new technologies, and to ask whether she is attempting to develop the stage as the last bastion of the living voice as a vehicle for creativity, or whether she is in fact attempting to bring about an explosive collision of computer screen and stage space, machine and body. Ultimately, Noonan argues that in her systematic undermining of all the theatrical conventions, Noëlle Renaude is among a small number of playwrights who are currently inventing new theatrical languages, dismantling and reconfiguring a new stage for a new century.

From My Perspective: Thriving in the New Audiology Frontier

From My Perspective: Thriving in the New Audiology Frontier

Effects of landscape composition and configuration on migrating songbirds: inference from an individual‐based model

The behavior of long-distance migrants during stopover is constrained by the need to quickly and safely replenish energetic reserves. Replenishing fuel stores at stopover sites requires adjusting to unfamiliar landscapes with little to no information about the distribution of resources. Despite their critical importance to the success of songbird migration, the effects of landscape composition and configuration on fuel deposition rates (FDR [g/d]), the currency of migration, has not been tested empirically. Our objectives were to understand the effects of heterogeneous landscapes on FDR of forest-dwelling songbirds during spring migration. The results of field experiments were used to parameterize a spatially explicit, individual-based model of forest songbird movement and resulting FDR. Further field experiments were used to validate the results from the individual-based model. In simulation experiments, we altered a Gulf South landscape in a factorial design to predict the effects of future patterns under different scenarios of land use change in which the abundance of high-quality hardwood habitat and the spatial aggregation of habitat varied. Simulated FDR decreased as the amount of hardwood in the landscape decreased from 41% to 22% to 12%. Further, migrants that arrived in higher-quality habitat types gained more mass. Counter to our expectations, FDR was higher with lower spatial aggregation of habitat. Differences in refueling rates may be most influenced by whether or not an individual experiences an initial searching cost after landing in poor-quality habitat. Therefore, quickly locating habitat with sufficient food resources at each stopover may be the most important factor determining a successful migration. Our findings provide empirical evidence for the argument that hardwood forest cover is a primary determinant of the quality of a stopover site in this region. This study represents the first effort to empirically quantify FDRs based on the configuration of landscapes.

Does the Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti approximate a Lévy search by an intrinsic bi-modal walk?

We suggest that the Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti approximates a Lévy search pattern by using an intrinsic bi-exponential walk and does so when a Lévy search pattern is advantageous. When attempting to locate its nest, M. bagoti adopt a stereotypical search pattern. These searches begin at the location where the ant expects to find the nest, and comprise loops that start and end at this location, and are directed in different azimuthal directions. Loop lengths are exponentially distributed when searches are in visually familiar surroundings and are well described by a mixture of two exponentials when searches are in unfamiliar landscapes. The latter approximates a power-law distribution, the hallmark of a Lévy search. With the aid of a simple analytically tractable theory, we show that an exponential loop-length distribution is advantageous when the distance to the nest can be estimated with some certainty and that a bi-exponential distribution is advantageous when there is considerable uncertainty regarding the nest location. The best bi-exponential search patterns are shown to be those that come closest to approximating advantageous Lévy looping searches. The bi-exponential search patterns of M. bagoti are found to approximate advantageous Lévy search patterns.

“Mensaje fue de Dios”: Transformative Christian Vision in the Libro de Alexandre

“Mensaje fue de Dios”: Transformative Christian Vision in the Libro de Alexandre Florence Curtis The Libro de Alexandre (ca. 1200) is the first work of the Old Castilian corpus of narrative poems known as the mester de clerecía.1 Critics have often conceived of the Castilian Alexander as a warrior of secular loyalties who betrays the divine order (Weiss 120). Isabel Uría Maqua describes the hero as enacting “una especie de rebelión contra Dios, un desafío a su poder” (“La soberbia” 518). The Castilian Alexander is broadly thought to continue to enshrine worldly glory in accordance with the hero’s life and times (Lida de Malkiel 182). [End Page 205] This article will argue that the Alexandre is ultimately concerned with the Christian perspective of man’s earthly purpose and a significantly recalibrated Alexander the Great of incremental allegiance to the Christian God. It will explore how faith is key for the protagonist who undergoes a series of visions across the text. Probing the frontiers of knowledge, the visions structure and pace the narrative, the key premise for which is Alexander’s disastrous misperception of the limits of his mind’s eye. The Alexandre is known to be the most learned of all the European Alexander texts (Brownlee, “Romance” 255), and pits the insight gleaned from philosophical inquiry against that from Christian experience in a daring exploration of theological doctrine. The portrayal of Alexander’s campaigns and voyages is indicative of significant tensions in contemporary theology. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, established centres of learning in the Iberian Peninsula sought to incorporate newly translated texts of pagan philosophy into their study of scripture (Uría Maqua, “La soberbia” 524–27). As is well known, the works of Aristotle, the majority of which were translated into Latin by the end of the twelfth century (Spade), were of particular interest to contemporary scholars. Despite the prohibition of Aristotle’s natural philosophy in Paris in 1210 and 1215, his writing fomented an increasing empiricism and emphasis on practical experience in the study of God’s creation, eroding the prohibition against scientific curiosity associated with the teaching of Augustine, particularly that which involved indulgence of the visual sense (Camille 131–34; Biernoff 65). The poet of the Alexandre may have trained in Toledo (Arizaleta, “El Libro” 82), where many classical texts were translated and stored. The global geography and intellectual reach of the Latin, “studiously classical and pagan” (Ross 1) Alexandreis (1178–82), captured the imagination of the poet of the Alexandre. Written by Gautier de Châtillon, a distinguished churchman and humanist of the late twelfth century, this first epic of the life of Alexander (Townsend 16), was so popular and well regarded that it was studied in contemporary cathedral schools in place of Lucan’s Pharsalia, the [End Page 206] Thebaid of Statius, and even Vergil’s Aeneid (Destombes 11). The author of the Alexandre used Châtillon’s historicizing account as his primary narrative model, yet derived over a third of his material from other sources and recast the legend in conformity with his own medieval Christian agenda (Willis 40, 65, 70). As demonstrated by Clara Pascual-Argente in her investigation of ekphrasis in the Alexandre, the anonymous poet further distinguished his writing from his major source. Subverting classical norms, he sought to incorporate graphic description and so “create a fundamental equivalence between word and image” (77). For Pascual-Argente, such word-image integration played a key role in fomenting cultural memory of the Alexander legend for a secular public. Extending her findings, I argue that the primary role of such representation is to guide the poem’s audience toward a deeper understanding of the proper status of pagan culture and knowledge as subsumed under Christian teaching. The technique of enargeia, used in the Alexandre to build mental pictures of unfamiliar landscape, complements the poem’s boastful self-image as one of Christian erudition: “Mester trayo fermoso: non es de joglaría; / mester es sin pecado, ca es de clerezía” (Casas Rigall 130; st. 2ab). In the Catholic tradition, Alexander is thought to appear in several passages of the Bible.2 Jerome’s...

The depth of the honeybee's backup sun-compass systems

Honeybees have at least three compass mechanisms: a magnetic compass; a celestial or sun compass, based on the daily rotation of the sun and sun-linked skylight patterns; and a backup celestial compass based on a memory of the sun's movements over time in relation to the landscape. The interactions of these compass systems have yet to be fully elucidated, but the celestial compass is primary in most contexts, the magnetic compass is a backup in certain contexts, and the bees' memory of the sun's course in relation to the landscape is a backup system for cloudy days. Here we ask whether bees have any further compass systems, for example a memory of the sun's movements over time in relation to the magnetic field. To test this, we challenged bees to locate the sun when their known celestial compass systems were unavailable, that is, under overcast skies in unfamiliar landscapes. We measured the bees' knowledge of the sun's location by observing their waggle dances, by which foragers indicate the directions toward food sources in relation to the sun's compass bearing. We found that bees have no celestial compass systems beyond those already known: under overcast skies in unfamiliar landscapes, bees attempt to use their landscape-based backup system to locate the sun, matching the landscapes or skylines at the test sites with those at their natal sites as best they can, even if the matches are poor and yield weak or inconsistent orientation.