No abstract

Colonial breeding is widespread among animals. Some, such as eusocial insects, may use agonistic behavior to partition available foraging habitat into mutually exclusive territories; others, such as breeding seabirds, do not. We found that northern gannets, satellite-tracked from twelve neighboring colonies, nonetheless forage in largely mutually exclusive areas and that these colony-specific home ranges are determined by densitydependent competition. This segregation may be enhanced by individual-level public information transfer, leading to cultural evolution and divergence among colonies.Main Text: Colonial animals are constrained by their colony locations, which are ultimately limited by resource availability (1). However, within species, potential colony home ranges often overlap, implying competition among colonies may also be limiting (2). In eusocial central-place foragers the spatial effects of direct competition among colonies are well understood (2). In contrast, the spatial influences of indirect competition and information transfer on non-territorial species (e.g. seals, swallows and seabirds), where levels of relatedness are much lower, remain conjectural. For example, the hinterland model (3) predicts that breeding seabirds segregate along colonial lines, because of inequalities in travel costs from each colony. Predicted home ranges therefore comprise Voronoi polygons (Fig. 1A), as seen in some territorial animals (2). Food availability is assumed to be proportional to polygon area, limiting colony size. An alternative model proposes that density-dependent competition among colony members is limiting (4). As colonies grow, local prey depletion or disturbance requires birds to travel further to provision their young. However, this model ('Ashmole's halo') does not consider interactions among colonies and tacitly assumes that adjacent colonies' home ranges overlap (5).Indirect evidence exists to support both models (3,6,7) and recent tracking studies suggest that seabirds and pinnipeds segregate along colonial lines (8-12). However, these studies proved inconclusive on the causes and ubiquity of segregation, largely because few colonies were sampled or tracking resolution was low. Here we use high resolution satellite-tracks of the foraging movements of 184 chick-rearing northern gannets Morus bassanus (hereafter gannets) from 12 of the 26 colonies fringing the British Isles (median 17 birds/colony), representing ~80% of the area's breeding population (Fig. 1A, Table S1), to test whether among-colony segregation occurs in a model colonial non-territorial central-place forager. We then use population-and individual-level models to explore potential mechanisms underlying spatial segregation.Gannets are wide-ranging (max. foraging range ~700 km) pelagic seabirds that forage in patches of enhanced production, primarily on shoaling, mesotrophic fish and to a lesser extent fisheries discards (13)(14)(15). In almost all cases we tracked birds from adjacent colonies simultaneously (16). Individua...

Background  Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena. Objective  The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm - that of post-positivism - but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure. Conclusion  The Cochrane Group, among others, has created a hierarchy that has been endorsed by many academic institutions, and that serves to (re)produce the exclusion of certain forms of research. Because 'regimes of truth' such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.

No exit? Have we arrived at an impasse in the health sciences? Has the regime of 'evidence', coupled with corporate models of accountability and 'best-practices', led to an inexorable decline in innovation, scholarship, and actual health care? Would it be fair to speak of a 'methodological fundamentalism' from which there is no escape? In this article, we make an argument about intellectual integrity and good faith. We take this risk knowing full well that we do so in a hostile political climate in the health sciences, positioning ourselves against those who quietly but assiduously control the very terms by which the public faithfully understands 'integrity' and 'truth'. In doing so, we offer an honest critique of these definitions and of the systemic power that is reproduced and guarded by the gatekeepers of 'Good Science'.

In hospital settings, and especially in forensic psychiatric ones, restlessness, aggression, and even violence are familiar issues to healthcare workers. Under these circumstances, the need for restrictive measures (seclusion, mechanical/chemical restraints) is sometimes needed. Although such measures should be considered as exceptional interventions, they continue to be widespread in general, psychiatric, and forensic psychiatric settings. Although there is a great deal of literature on a myriad of issues associated with the use of seclusion, very little research has focused on the lived experience of the seclusion room in forensic psychiatric settings, whether from the patient's perspective or from the perspective of nursing staff responsible for these patients. Such an examination could help ameliorate the experience of secluded forensic psychiatric patients while informing nursing staff about the impacts of seclusion. This article reports the results of a federally funded qualitative, phenomenological research study conducted in a Canadian forensic psychiatric environment. Our results show that the "structure of place" matters for both patients who experience seclusion and nursing staff who work therapeutically in these settings. "Place" is irreducible to the physical "space" in which bodies find themselves; this study of place took into consideration the ways the lived body experiences seclusion and interrelates with others. Although there can be no doubt that many patients who experience seclusion are oftentimes objectively at risk, with a heightened potential to self-harm and to harm other inpatients and nursing staff as well, as our study participants attested, the bodies secluded in this space are not "objects."