Taste preference tests, with simultaneous presentation of treated and untreated food, were administered to 24 common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus). The bats received brief exposures to four different stimuli representing sweet, salty, sour, and bitter tastes, each at four different concentrations. Despite a strong location bias, the bats significantly (P < 0.01) avoided the highest concentrations of the salty, sour, and bitter tastes. Consumption of the sweet stimulus at all concentrations was similar to that of the untreated standard. Vampires evidently can discriminate based on taste, although their ability is apparently poorly developed when compared with some euryphagous species such as the rat. Hence, taste is probably not a factor in host selection by the vampire.
Abstract-Degradation of the pesticide 3-chloro-p-toluidine hydrochloride (CPTH) occurred in a loam soil when applied at concentrations of 3.5 and 35 g/g. The compound degraded according to pseudo-first-order kinetics, with a calculated rate constant of 2.74 ϫ 10 Ϫ2 h Ϫ1 , at a soil temperature of 22ЊC; this rate constant yielded a half-life of 25 h. The loss of radiolabeled CPTH from soil was suggested to be controlled by both irreversible binding to the soil colloids and microbial transformation. Mineralization of the radiolabeled CPTH was interpreted as involving two zero-order kinetic rates; an initial rate of carbon dioxide release was estimated to be 0.33% d Ϫ1 (half-life of 152 d), followed by a slower rate of 0.07% d Ϫ1 , which resulted in a half-life of 718 d. Approximately 13% of the radiolabeled CPTH that was applied to soil at 3.5 g/g was mineralized to [14 C] carbon dioxide during the 99-d incubation period. A primary metabolite was identified as N-acetyl-3-chloro-p-toluidine (ACPTH); this metabolite reached a maximum concentration at the 1-d sampling period, and degraded with a pseudo-first-order rate constant of 2.67 ϫ 10 Ϫ2 h Ϫ1 ; the half-life for ACPTH was calculated to be 26 h. When CPTH was applied to soil at 35 g/g, the compound was also mineralized in soil by a similar metabolic pathway to that observed at the lower concentration. However, the rate of mineralization was slower, which suggests that elevated soil concentrations of CPTH may affect the viability of certain microorganisms.
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