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Utilization of faeces has long been a popular approach for genetic and ecological studies of wildlife. However, the success of molecular marker genotyping and genome resequencing is often unpredictable due to insufficient enrichment of endogenous DNA in the total faecal DNA that is dominated by bacterial DNA. Here, we report a simple and cheap method named PEERS to predominantly lyse animal cells over bacteria by using sodium dodecyl sulphate so as to discharge endogenous DNA into liquid phase before bacterial DNA. By brief centrifugation, total DNA with enriched endogenous fraction can be extracted from the supernatant using routine methods. Our assessments showed that the endogenous DNA extracted by PEERS was significantly enriched for various types of faeces from different species, preservation time and conditions. It significantly improves the genotyping correctness and efficiency of genome resequencing with the total additional cost of $ 0.1 and a short incubation step to treat a faecal sample. We also provide methods to assess the enrichment efficiency of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA and models to predict the usability of faecal DNA for genotyping of short tandem repeat, single‐nucleotide polymorphism and whole‐genome resequencing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines scatology in Aristophanes Assemblywomen , and argues that the play sets out to subvert comedy's normal scatological poetics. Old Comedy is usually a genre characterized by corporeal and scatological freedom. The constipation scene in Assemblywomen 311–73 is therefore highly unusual, since, while its language is scatological almost to the point of excess, it spotlights not scatological freedom but scatological obstruction. This article argues that this inversion is expressly linked to the play's reversal of gender roles as part of its 'women on top' plot, which is in turn conceived as a direct challenge to Old Comedy's normative poetics. The article further suggests that recognizing the Assemblywomen 's less than straightforward relationship to the norms of Old Comedy may help us to reassess how, and indeed whether, we should use Aristophanes' plays to make conjectures about the genre as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its political ideology, large sectors of Israeli society hold the belief that only people who share its ethnocratic values can share the same hygiene identity with it, reflecting its self-perception as a pure national subject. This is the context in which scatological works based on radical materialism and ethical critique first appeared in Israeli performance and video art at the turn of the twenty-first century. The artworks under discussion seek to consider humankind as machines that produce waste, with an emphasis on the excess waste that separates those who are excluded from the dominant Israeli-nationalist-Zionist view or discourse. Some artists employ excrement as a tool to degrade power structures, while others see it as a source of creativity and an alternative way of material and ethical life. Performing feces, or being shit, constitutes a position of creation, observation, and being to which we should pay particular attention at this moment in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines images of the body and laughter in Alain Mabanckou's novel Verre Cassé (2005). Using Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, this discussion highlights how carnivalesque humor operates in the novel through scatological imagery and informal diction. The novel's eponymous writer-protagonist documents tragic tales of his compatriots in a bar that Verre Cassé himself frequents. Through this alcoholic writer wallowing in his own excrement, Mabanckou suspends conventions of literary and social propriety. Images of excretion and copulation, and familiar speech of the "marketplace" punctuate the novel, as Mabanckou draws laughter from the fate of the novel's suffering heroes. I argue that this carnivalesque idiom makes possible an ambivalently utopic world—the black Other who rejects social decorum exists free from but also outside conventional society. As the bar's patrons consume their lives away in alcohol, they forego social decorum, living as social pariahs in the margins of society. By portraying the suffering that afflicts the black African body in resolutely ludic terms, Mabanckou transgresses the grim image of African literature. This ambivalent gesture carnivalizes the dreary realities of postcolonial Congo wrought by both colonization and internal conflict, all-the-while injecting levity where there seems to be no place for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scatological is often relegated to the realm of humor and the juvenile, the transgressive and disturbing nature of the fecal neutralized through its demotion to the basest stratum of humor, where it serves as humor's lowest common denominator, the kind of subject that children delight in. Rather than concede to this narrative, which would make of scatological humor a temporary, Bakhtinian carnivalesque inversion of social norms and order, this article explores what it would mean to take the scatological seriously. To reject the laughter associated with the carnivalesque and decline to take the scatological as comic relief is to claim fecality as the site of a more durable emancipation than the carnivalesque affords, by exploiting fecality's capacity to enable the assimilation of the inassimilable fact of mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La escatología constituye uno de los recursos humorísticos esenciales del teatro del Siglo de Oro a pesar de que la crítica literaria ha tendido a obviar que autores tan consagrados como Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina o Calderón de la Barca mezclaban sus ficciones con materia fecal. Las obras dramáticas demuestran la existencia de procedimientos frecuentes que los dramaturgos utilizaban como lugares comunes y que permiten realizar una clasificación tripartita de motivos escatológicos: los vinculados con la gastronomía, el miedo y la sátira del cortejo. En ellos, el gracioso no es el único blanco de las heces, pero sí la víctima predilecta, pues se enmarca en un sistema que certifica la correspondencia entre la clase inferior, las funciones fisiológicas y las características risibles. Scatology constitutes one of the essential humorous resources of Spanish Golden Age theater, despite the fact that literary criticism has tended to ignore that established authors such as Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca mixed their fictions with feces. The dramatic works prove the existence of frequent procedures that the playwrights used as commonplace and that allow a tripartite classification of scatological motifs: those related to gastronomy, to fear, and to the satire of courtship. In them, the "gracioso" is not the only target of the feces, but the favorite victim, since it is part of a system that certifies the correspondence between the lower class, physiological functions, and laughable characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural roots of an aggrieved white masculinity--white man as victim--run deep in the popular imaginary. Media representation in particular has a long legacy of portraying white male bodies as injured or wounded, dating back to the bloody "hard bodies" of Reagan-era action films. This essay returns to another one of these earlier cultural moments, examining the vulgar physical comedy of the Jackass media franchise as a window into masculine formations in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Specifically, I examine Jackass's "stupid" white masculinity, which combines bloody self-injury with a scatological logic of bodily incoherence displayed by the show's pissing, shitting, and puking white stuntmen. Viewed retrospectively--against the contemporary horrors of Charlottesville, El Paso, and other places memorialized by Trumpian eruptions of murderous white masculinity--the dumb white dudes of Jackass appear almost a blip in the rearview mirror, now superseded by a return to something far more sinister. Yet Jackass in its own time expressed a hegemonic white masculinity specific to neoliberal and neoconservative forces of the Clinton and Bush years, one organized ambivalently around an excessive anality. This ambivalent anality both parodied national and gendered fantasies of "hardness" at the same time that it drew on dynamics of racial and queer mimesis to reinscribe hegemonic (white/straight) masculinity. However, the more recent development of a queer ecological perspective allows us to revisit the show's scatology, also seeing in it what Nicole Seymour has described as an ethical "counter-phobia" which refuses the nature/culture binary that informs Western culture's deeply embedded erotophobia and somatophobia. This essay takes up the ambivalent anality of Jackass, tracing the ways it has served as precursor to present-day logics of white male grievance, even as its spectacular scatology offers an undertheorized challenge to the cultural revulsion for embodiment and nature that informs all social (gendered, racial, sexual) logics of domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how ballad song was appropriated to present the demise of the Rump Parliament and commemorate the restoration of the monarchy. Songs not only provide a tune through which words can be performed but also weave together disparate texts through memory of past utterances and performances. The tune "Cook Laurel" establishes a mnemonic connection between parliamentarian figures and ubiquitous rascals in Elizabethan folklore and in Ben Jonson's Gypsies Metamorphosed , performed in 1621. This use of song emphasizes and consolidates representations of parliamentarians as rogues, thus offering royalists a way to lament the regicide and to celebrate the Restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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It is over 20 years since Marlene van Niekerk published Triomf ([1994] 1999, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball), a satire of the poor white Benade family, who have been bedazzled by apartheid ideology. This iconoclastic satire was published originally in Afrikaans in 1994, the year of the first democratic elections in South Africa. This article offers a close reading of "Peace on Earth", a chapter that desublimates significant sacred icons in Afrikaner cultural mythology and offers a critique of the intricate workings of ideology. Notably, this critique relies upon the abjection of the male Afrikaner's body, in particular that of Treppie Benade. Treppie, the satirist, is found sitting upon the "throne" (toilet) as he purges himself of the lies and illusions of apartheid ideology through a lengthy scatology. This article begins by situating the novel in terms of its commentary on the apartheid government's attempt to rehabilitate the abject of the Afrikaner volk: poor white "trash". It highlights excrement as a master trope of the satirist before analysing the allusions to Judeo-Christian iconography and (e)scatology (invoked in the Great Trek narrative) in terms of their resonances with Louis Althusser's and Slavoj Žižek's concepts of ideology. Further, I explore Treppie's faecal tapestry in terms of an immanent sublime, drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and Friedrich Nietzsche's Dionysian sublime. In conclusion, I consider Treppie's final words and orientation at the end of the novel, and the implications of his Dionysian approach to an uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of L'Année Rabelaisienne is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The overpopulation of domestic cats (Felis catus) presents a serious concern for wildlife conservationists, animal welfare advocates, public health officials, and community members alike. In cities, free-ranging, unowned cats often form high-density groups (commonly called 'colonies') around human provisioned food sources. While previous diet studies have primarily utilized morphology-based methods, molecular techniques offer a higher resolution alternative. In this study, we used next-generation sequencing techniques to examine the diet composition of feral cats living in five Trap-Neuter-Return colonies located in urban parks on Staten Island, a borough of New York City. We hypothesized that (1) cats living in urban colonies would still consume natural prey despite being regularly fed and (2) that the composition of taxa represented in the diet of each colony would vary, possibly due to differences in prey availability across sites. In total, 16 vertebrate prey taxa were identified in the diet, 13 at the genus level and 3 at the family level. Despite being regularly fed, 58.2% of cat scats contained DNA from natural prey. The diet composition of the cat colonies differed depending on the land cover composition surrounding the colony with the frequency of native prey positively correlated with the proportion of green space and that of non-native prey with developed land cover types. The use of molecular techniques combined with environmental DNA methods offers a promising, non-invasive approach to assessing the diet and consequently, impact of a highly abundant and non-native predator on the persistence of wildlife communities in cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Niq Mhlongo's use of scatology in Dog Eat Dog foregrounds his exploration of the temporal affects of disillusionment and disappointment. Drawing together critical and theoretical writing on affect, scatology, the postcolony, and abjection, this article contends that corporeality is symbolically and politically significant in the postapartheid imaginary. This significance is evident throughout Dog Eat Dog, especially in two episodes set in university toilets, which explore through corporeal imagery the topics of racial abjection, vulnerability, and exclusion in postapartheid South Africa. The article draws attention to the affective and political aspects of Mhlongo's excremental postapartheid vision, a feature of his (and others') writing which should not be dismissed, for example, as extraneous or merely comic detail. Implicit in the argument is the call for nuanced readings in postapartheid literature of the body and its processes; these representations of corporeality often signal political inequality and exclusion within the social body itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Web 2.0 has facilitated a particularly toxic brand of digital men's rights activism, collectively known as the Manosphere. This amorphous network of online publics is noted for its virulent anti-feminism, extreme misogyny and synergies with the alt-right. Early manifestations of this phenomenon were confined largely to 4/Chan, Reddit and numerous alt-right forums. More recently, however, this rhetoric has become increasingly evident in Urban Dictionary. This article presents the findings of a machine-learning and manual analysis of Urban Dictionary's entries relating to sex and gender, to assess the extent to which the Manosphere's discourses of extreme misogyny and anti-feminism are working their way into everyday vernacular contexts. It also considers the sociolinguistic and gender-political implications of algorithmic and linguistic capitalism, concluding that Urban Dictionary is less a dictionary than it is a platform of folksonomies, which may exert a disproportionate and toxic influence on online discourses related to gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of French Studies is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Miller's Tale attacks authority and permanence of status among a highly class-conscious, small bourgeoisie, using the humiliation through bottom-kissing found in the Old French fabliaux Berengier au Lonc Cul and La Gageure. Chaucer's recollection of these fabliaux may have influenced the postures of Alisoun and Nicholas in the Miller's Tale's window scenes, scenes that ultimately result in a loss of status, certainty, and authority for all of the major characters but Alisoun. Moreover, the ancient motif of apotropaic sexual exhibitionism, where the display of female genitalia, the buttocks, and farting averted demons, is comically used to imagine Absolon as such a demon when he comes wooing at Alisoun's window on the night of her tryst with Nicholas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does scatology function in postcolonial fiction today? And what might that idiom tell us about neoliberalism as a cynical political rationality sweeping the developing world? Aravind Adiga's exemplary 2008 satire on globalizing India, The White Tiger , parodies how neoliberalism normalizes misanthropic self-interest as the truth of society and human nature today. Michel Foucault identified this self-interest as a newly emergent form of rational choice, one that shapes human beings into "entrepreneurs of themselves." These subjects are governed by the brutally instrumentalist terms of investment, risk, and cost-benefit. The novel parodies this subject position through the language of neoliberal disgust, a form of scatological rhetoric that inverts the traditionally oppositional function of scatology by rendering the victims of underdevelopment the authors of their own oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wojtowicz explores Mikołaj Rej's Figliki (1574), where the "figlik" is understood as a subgenre of the epigram developed by Rej. Most of his figliks were paraphrases of other authors (Poggio Bracciolini, Heinrich Bebel and others). In the epigrams analysed by Wojtowicz, Rej refers to Catholic liturgical drama. Contextualising Rej's "figliks" with other "figliks" that thematise religion, this article highlights performative aspects and the embodied and material dimension of communication. Rej shows how the spontaneous behaviour of both the actors and the audience allows the everyday to enter the Catholic rite and subverts the message of the dramatisation - a message intended to be uplifting but proven ineffective in religious terms. Even a minor and unintentional moment of awkwardness on the part of the actors or the audience's inappropriate reaction make it possible to destabilise the hateful rite present in the papacy present in the Catholic liturgical drama. Rej reveals the mechanism whereby the performative situation spontaneously becomes autonomous, eluding any religious control by the Church. Rej's satire and mockery also result from his religious pedagogy: Catholic liturgical drama puts the salvation of laypersons at risk [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of its important role as predator of small game species, estimating the density of red fox Vulpes vulpes has been hampered by the species' highly variable ranging pattern and elusive behavior. DNA analysis from scats combined with spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) modeling might remedy this. In a 50-km2 coniferous forest in southeast Norway, we collected scats on logging roads in late winter. DNA was extracted, amplified, and genotyped using 11 microsatellite markers. Of 184 samples collected, 126 were genotyped successfully, of which 46 (36.5%) produced individual genetic profiles. Twenty-five of these were different individuals: 13 females and 12 males. Nine of them were identified in multiple scats; mean recapture rate among all was 1.8/animal. Applying a conventional capture-recapture model (CAPWIRE) to the genotyped samples, 36 (95% CI 26-52) different individuals were estimated to have been present in the area during the sampling period. For estimating population density, we constructed three differently sized occupancy areas based on distances between recaptures, viz. ½ and 1/1 mean maximum distance moved (MMDM) and the local convex hull home range method (LoCoH). Areas varied from 60 km2 (½MMDM) to 112 km2 (MMDM), producing density estimates of 0.60 and 0.32 foxes/km2, respectively; the 95% LoCoH range method produced an estimate of 0.44 animals/km2. Based on SECR modeling, the density was estimated at 0.38 (95% CI 0.21-0.70) animals/km2. Smaller confidence intervals are expected with more appropriate sampling design than used in this pilot study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on humor embedded in the delivery and lyrics of a form of song sung by Zulu women in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa still widely practiced in rural areas, called amaculo omgonqo 'puberty songs.' The aim is to ascertain how and why young Zulu females sing these unusual songs which are normally sung in the days preceding two rites of passage ceremonies; firstly, the umhlonyane ceremony, which is held to mark a young girl's first menstruation during her puberty years, and secondly, approximately 10 years later, the umemulo 'coming of age' ceremony which is held for young girls who have reached marriageable age. Analysis is made of the unusual use of scatological and ribald language in these songs, which are sung by young girls before these two ceremonies. These songs are rendered socially acceptable only because of the context in which they are sung, and for the bawdy humor which is core to the lyrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Complutense Journal of English Studies is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Guillaume Bouchet wrote 36 conversations which he presents as taking place in Poitou at convivial evening gatherings (or ‘Serées’). Each conversation has a theme. That of the sixteenth Serée (first published in 1597) is dreams. The debate is triggered as usual by an incident that has just occurred within the fictional frame: the host refused to invite someone that evening who had turned up earlier in the day and tried to cadge an invitation by claiming to have dreamed that the host was roasting a pig (as indeed he was). The debate proceeds smoothly, but after several pages it is rudely interrupted by a wisecracker, described as ‘vilain’. He is intent on telling everyone about a recent dream in which he soiled himself. This disgusts the listeners and disrupts the erudite exchange of learned commonplaces about dreams. Unusually for an event within the fictional frame of one Serée, it also occasions the theme of thenextone, which begins with the assembled guests refusing to sit nearer the joker in case he still smells. Bouchet uses thisvilainfigure to foster the distinctively unsettling but constructive epistemology of theSerées, and to represent knowing as inseparable from having a body, from having faculties that straddle body and mind, and from being a social animal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Molecular methods allow noninvasive assessment of vertebrate predator-prey systems at high taxonomic resolution by examining dietary samples such as faeces and pellets. To facilitate the interpretation of field-derived data, feeding trials, investigating the impacts of biological, methodological and environmental factors on prey DNA detection, have been conducted. The effect of meal size, however, has not yet been explicitly considered for vertebrate consumers. Moreover, different noninvasively obtained sample types remain to be compared in such experiments. Here, we present a feeding trial on abundant piscivorous birds, Great Cormorants ( Phalacrocorax carbo), to assess meal size effects on postfeeding prey DNA detection success. Faeces and pellets were sampled twice a day after the feed of large (350-540 g), medium (190-345 g) and small (15-170 g) fish meals contributing either a large (>79%) or small (<38%) share to the daily consumption. Samples were examined for prey DNA and fish hard parts. Molecular analysis of faeces revealed that both large meal size and share had a significantly positive effect on prey DNA detection rate postfeeding. Furthermore, large meals were detectable for a significantly longer time span with a detection limit at ~76 hr and a 50% detection probability at ~32 hr postfeeding. In pellets, molecular methods reliably identified the meal consumed the previous day, which was not possible via morphological analysis or when examining individual faeces. The less reliable prey DNA detection of small meals or meal shares in faeces signifies the importance of large numbers of dietary samples to obtain reliable trophic data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regarded by critics as one of Philip Roth's comic and salacious masterpieces, Sabbath's Theater incorporates a fascinatingly large amount of intertextual responses to William Shakespeare's sublime tragedy King Lear. From Gloucester's opening account of enjoying the creation of his bastard son in the opening of Act I to King Lear's proclamation to "Let Copulation Thrive" in Act IV scene 6, Roth draws on Shakespeare's tragedy to present his own modern version of extramarital love-affairs, betrayal, madness, suicide, and acknowledgments of mistakes and regrets. Both heroes are observed to be quite mad, yet many sympathized with their situation even though it was in both cases their own doing, for Lear's and Sabbath's madness are comprehensible due to their respective losses. This contribution will try to argue that Mickey Sabbath played the role of King Lear not merely off-Broadway in the 1950s, but later in his life in a modern version of the legendary King of Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writers have long employed scatology for shock value, satire, grotesque humor, and as a stimulus for philosophizing. In Molloy,Samuel Beckett employs scatology not only for satire but as a touchstone in examining the themes of language, creativity, religion, and existentialism. Beckett uses excrement as a metaphor to pursue his theories of language as excess. This leads naturally to the topic of creativity, which psychologists had associated with defecation in the infant mind, and to mythology, where we also find the association with creation. In looking at religion, the scatological can be elevated alchemically through psychology and mythology, or it can be used satirically to bring religion down- Molloytraverses both paths, scrutinizing Catholicism in particular. Finally, excrement functions in the novel as a leveler, both among humans and of humans, suggesting that much of the sentiment behind the shame, disgust, and evasion of excrement is rooted in existential anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a concise summary of Luther's anti-Jewish treatise, On the Schem Hamphoras and On the Lineage of Christ (March 1543) and describes its purpose, interworkings, and scatological rhetoric. The treatise is interpreted as Luther's defense of the Second Commandment over against Jewish superstitions regarding the name of God; his attempt to undermine the credibility of the rabbis and their influence on the Christian Hebraists; and his further strengthening of his platform for the expulsion of the Jews as initially articulated in On the Jews and Their Lies (January 1543). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1723, following an opera production in Florence, two sets of medals were made there in honour of the singer Faustina Bordoni. Among the reactions to these medals in Bologna were satirical poetry and a set of ceramic chamber pots that carried depictions of the medals and a scathing Latin text. The article analyses these artefacts, the various descriptions and drawings of them and reports about them for what they can tell us about the intertwined issues of celebrity, the status of (female) singers, the circulation of information and the interaction between objects and words in early eighteenth-century Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on annotation of text related to the works of poet and playwright William Shakespeare. Topics discussed include the role of syntactical inversions and archaic grammatical usage in glossing, the deficiency of scatology and outright bawdly in the twentieth century glossing, and the complications of the unconscious resistance to new meaning on interpretation.

From Les Fêtes d'Hébé and Dardanus in 1739 to the revival of Hippolyte et Aricie in 1778, Rameau and his music were the target of satirical engravers and designers. While some of the artists remain anonymous, others include such famous names as Louis Carrogis dit Carmontelle, Charles-Nicolas Cochin II the younger, and Marin Fessard the younger, after Pierre-Louis Durand and Charles-Nicolas Cochin II the younger. This article gives a chronological panorama of the engravings, analysing their iconography in detail and identifying their sources, motives and polemical context. The images are examined in conjunction with a group of drawings by Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin (1721-86) in his Livre de caricatures tant bonnes que mauvaises, dating from 1740 to 1775 and preserved in the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon Manor, England. Those drawings relating to Rameau in this collection, still almost entirely unknown to musicologists, will be discussed in relation to a recent Voltaire Foundation publication devoted to them in 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this hermeneutical study on a canto that represents the emblematic center of all Dante's Inferno, we find a reflection about the extensive network of symbols which is related with the vice of greed, highlighting for the first time the hidden kinship between apparently different faults: usury, blasphemy and sodomy. Geryon the monster appears at the beginning, connecting us with mercantilism as a socio-historical phenomenon rapidly evolving when Europe sees its transition from feudalism to proto-capitalism. Later, the animalized figure of Reginaldo Scrovegni, in this same alienating context (the sole infernal canto which is entirely coloured as a fresco), suggests the implicit, ironic and disturbing presence of Giotto, with a secret moral reference (as a cruel contrappasso) to his famous masterpiece of Padua. Immediate horror and beauty come grotesquely together thus, in this hellish space, with a specific and surprising sarcastic power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic information can be critical in identifying conservation priorities and developing conservation strategies. There is an urgent need for noninvasive genetic tools to study the wild populations of Asian colobine monkeys. The majority of these species are threatened with habitat destruction, population reduction and even extinction, but generally lack information on their genetic diversity and population structure. Genetic sampling and tissue collection have been scarce in these species owing to strict regulations on manipulation of endangered species, and the difficulties and risks associated with capturing these arboreal and fast-moving monkeys in the challenging environments that they inhabit. These difficulties have hindered the development of molecular genetic markers, which are usually derived from tissues or blood. In this study, we present a method for de novo microsatellite isolation and genotyping using DNA from noninvasive origins of a critically endangered Asian colobine, the white-headed langur ( Trachypithecus leucocephalus). Genomic DNA isolated from hair was shown to be sufficient for microsatellite enrichment and isolation, with similar isolation efficiencies as from tissue DNA. We identified and characterized 20 polymorphic microsatellite loci, and evaluated their amplification success and genotyping reliability with 86 field-collected fecal samples. These results show that this panel of loci can produce reliable genotypes from fecal samples, and represent a useful tool for noninvasive investigation of genetic structure, individual identification and kinship assessment in this highly endangered species. Our approach can be applied to conservation genetic studies of other wild species that lack sequence information and tissue samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the scatology of children's humour. It dwells on the two aspects of humour including joke as a context-bound act for social communication. The author argues on scatological humour which regards only to children and adds that is connects chidren to the older generation. He then provides examples of scatological humour from various parts of the world and from children as well as adult including dirt and defecation.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various topics within the issue including examples of laughing together as way for rapport building, forms of scatological humour, its uses and effects.

This essay explores how the figuring of place throughout the fiction and drama of Samuel Beckett registers and critiques narratives of place in Irish nationalist discourse. The Irish place-names of Beckett’s texts are read in relation to a toponymic re-territorialisation in post-independence Ireland, a process which enervated place identities synonymous with a Protestant culture and history. In this way, the essay argues that the celebrated “placelessness” of Beckett’s work and the collapse of spatial agency experienced by his protagonists is informed by the construction of nation-space in the country of the author’s early life. The preponderance of scatological place-names in the Beckett oeuvre is approached in these terms and read as a mode of resistance to the self-sacrifice to nation demanded in emplacement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Saverio Guida has recently published an article concerning the polemical exchange between the Gévaudan troubadours Garin d'Apchier and Torcafol, describing it, rightly, as the « other side of the art of trobar ». An analysis of one of the poems in this cycle (a ten-line cobla composed by Garin d'Apchier) allows us to be more precise about what it meant by this term. The thematic - carnaval-like - putting-forward of lower bodily activity, against a poetic system already perceived as sclerotic, is accompanied in Garin's case by a sophisticated and ludic conception of writing as linguistic play on language itself. The article includes in an annex an edition of this cobla. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diet of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina richardii) in San Francisco Bay (SFB), California, was determined from July 2007 to July 2008 using prey hard parts recovered from 442 scats collected at five haul-out sites. Twenty-two species of fish and one species of crustacean were identified, but harbor seals primarily ate a nonnative invasive species, yellowfin goby (Acanthogobius flavimanus), which increased in dietary importance since the diet was last studied in 1991/1992. Additionally, another nonnative invasive fish species, chameleon goby (Tridentiger trigonocephalus), was found for the first time in the diet of harbor seals in SFB. Harbor seal diet was statistically different between years (1991/1992 and 2007/2008), between the pupping and nonpupping seasons, and between North SFB and South SFB haul-out locations. The diet of harbor seals was significantly correlated with fish species caught in trawl surveys conducted by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) during the same time periods as this study (2007/2008). Harbor seals currently are influencing the health of the SFB ecosystem in a positive manner by consuming large quantities of nonnative invasive fish species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extraintestinal nematodes of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) are a wide group of parasites that infect wild and domestic carnivores and occasionally humans. Nematodes in the cardiopulmonary system, stomach, urinary apparatus and muscle tissue of 165 red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) from north-west Italy (Liguria and Piedmont) were investigated between 2009 and 2012. Of the cardiopulmonary nematodes, a high prevalence of Angiostrongylus vasorum and Eucoleus aerophilus (syn. Capillaria aerophila) was found, 78.2% and 41.8% respectively; Crenosoma vulpis (15.8%) and Filaroides spp. (4.8%) were also found. Spirocerca lupi (23.5%), Aonchotheca putorii (syn. Capillaria putorii) (8.6%) and Physaloptera spp. (2.5%) were detected in the stomach and Pearsonema plica (syn. Capillaria plica) (56.8%) in the bladder. Eucoleus boehmi (syn. Capillaria boehmi) was also detected in the nasal cavities of one of the two foxes examined. A coprological examination revealed eggs of E. aerophilus, A. putorii, S. lupi, Physaloptera spp. and eggs of intestinal parasites. Filarial worms were absent in all the 165 animals examined, nor was there evidence of Trichinella spp. in any of the foxes. The foxes were found to host a high prevalence of many species of extraintestinal nematodes. The prevalence of A. vasorum in foxes found in the present study is among the highest in Europe. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, E. boehmi and Filaroides spp. have never been reported before in this host in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, several scientific publications have come to the conclusion that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart might have had a Tourette syndrome. Other papers, however, have questioned this hypothetical diagnosis. The evidence for this diagnosis was mostly based on the so-called Bäsle letters, letters that Mozart wrote to his cousin when aged around 20 years. The letters have common stylistic characteristics such as frequent mention of erotic topics and, in particular, intensive use of scatological terms. However, these characteristics cannot be interpreted as clearly indicating a Tourette syndrome but may rather be related to psychosocial and cultural aspects of that time. There is little evidence for a Tourette syndrome from other sources, such as reports of behavioural abnormalities, and the evidence is not convincing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, AndreaMcKenzie argues that the scatological and bawdy humor for which early eighteenth-century highwayman lives were so notorious functioned as a particularly pungent form of social and political commen- tary. The invocation of both blackguard protagonists and authors reinforced the element of social shaming and inversion, while the common trope of the "biting the biter" (implying that it is no crime to con, outwit, or despoil those who prey on others) was readily adaptable to a Tory or "Country" satirical program. She also aims to shed new light on an old and vexed question: to what degree were representations of social inversion normative or subversive? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polar bears ( Ursus maritimus) are heavily dependent on marine prey, in particular ice-associated seals, which they hunt on landfast sea ice or free-floating pack ice. Dramatic current (and predicted) losses of sea ice habitat make it increasingly important to gain more knowledge of the relative use by bears of all types of prey from the marine food web as well as from terrestrial sources. This study uses frequency of occurrence of food items in 119 polar bear scats sampled on the sea ice as well as on shore in coastal areas in the Svalbard Archipelago, mainly in spring, between 2003 and 2010 to explore the diet of bears in the region. Ringed seals ( Pusa hispida) occurred in 62.2 % (CI 52.8-70.9 %) of the scat samples examined. Various terrestrial plants (32.8 %, CI 24.4-42.0 %) and marine algae (21.8 %, CI 14.8-30.4 %) also occurred frequently in the scats; the significance of this high occurrence of plants and algae is not clear. Bearded seals ( Erignathus barbatus) and various bird species constituted only minor components of the diet, while Svalbard reindeer ( Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus) occurred in 9.2 % (CI 4.7-15.9 %) of the scats, indicating that this species may play a more important role than previously reported. The novel combination of genetic analyses of material in the fecal samples along with detailed exploration of the physical-structural properties of prey hairs and plant parts provided a much fuller picture of the diet of polar bears than would have been possible from observational studies of polar bear predation behavior alone. This approach may provide an important tool for monitoring the responses of polar bears to ongoing ecosystem changes that will result from continued warming in the Arctic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation plans may conflict when both predator and prey in the same ecological system are threatened species. In this study we present a problematic case of conflicting conservation policies involving the Arabian wolf Canis lupus arabs and two species of gazelles (Gazella gazella acaciae and Gazella dorcas), all of which are threatened in Israel. By studying genetic subdivision using faecal DNA we evaluated the policy of treating the Arabian wolves in the Negev Desert as two separate populations. We analysed 95 wolf faecal samples from 12 feeding sites c. 20 km apart. Network analysis and Bayesian clustering were used for separating populations. Mark–recapture design, rarefaction and an urn model were applied to estimate wolf population size. We found that wolves in the central and southern Negev cannot be genetically separated, and their density is similar in both regions. Our results provide a better baseline for a unified management of wolves in the Negev. We call for the consideration of other factors influencing gazelle population size before adopting drastic measures such as wolf removal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The German journal London und Paris called James Gillray 'the foremost living artist in his genre, not only amongst Englishmen, but amongst all European nations'. Despite the scholarly attention he has attracted, many of Gillray's individual works have yet to receive rigorous analysis. One such neglected print is National Conveniences (1796), assumed to be a crude, straightforward expression of national supremacy. However, a closer reading shows Gillray employing the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau both to undermine notions of English superiority and to assail a particular personal adversary. With this reading in mind, we can reassess references to Rousseau in Gillray's other prints, and propose a new direction from which to approach his greater oeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report an investigation of the utility of coprological analysis as an alternative technique to study parasite specificity whenever host sampling is problematic; acanthocephalans from marine mammals were used as a model. A total of 252 scats from the South American sea lion, Otaria flavescens, and rectal faeces from 43 franciscanas, Pontoporia blainvillei, from Buenos Aires Province, were examined for acanthocephalans. Specimens of two species, i.e. Corynosoma australe and C. cetaceum, were collected from both host species. In sea lions, 78 out of 145 (37.9%) females of C. australe were gravid and the sex ratio was strongly female-biased. However, none of the 168 females of C. cetaceum collected was gravid and the sex ratio was not female-biased. Conversely, in franciscanas, 14 out of 17 (82.4%) females of C. cetaceum were gravid, but none of 139 females of C. australe was, and the sex ratio of C. cetaceum, but not that of C. australe, was female-biased. In putative non-hosts, the size of worms was similar to that from specimens collected from prey. Results suggest that both acanthocephalans contact sea lions and franciscanas regularly. However, C. australe and C. cetaceum cannot apparently reproduce, nor even grow, in franciscanas and sea lions, respectively. Coprological analysis may represent a useful supplementary method to investigate parasite specificity, particularly when host carcasses are difficult to obtain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]