Environmental Science

This paper demonstrates, by means of photographies, the proliferation of bicycles in the urban landscape of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, during the years of 2015-2017.  It addresses, among other issues, the adoption of the bicycle as a means of transportation for public service professionals such as police officers and waste collectors.

It also indicates the growing economic arrangements connected with the bicycle, such as bike cafés, shops that provide bike-exclusive parking spaces and a new wave of so-called "bike friendly" services.

The use of the bicycle in the city of São Paulo for purposes of mobility is not a new phenomenon, much less brought and/or based on existing infrastructure. Cyclists have faced the city streets for more than 10 years, and have had growing influence in the participation of public mobility policies concerning cycling. However, the inclusion of cycling as a key element in the design of municipal policies during the years 2012-2016 gave academic, social, economic and cultural visibility to the bicycle. This emergence gave way to a wave of new cyclists and affected the urban bike scene in the city. This research contemplated two objectives: the first one was to understand how the bicycle is used by the various social actors of the city, and its impact regarding lifestyles, sociabilities, appropriation of urban space, and the intrinsically corporal aspect that tangents the cycling experience. The second objective was the differentiated empirical construction of a contemporary research problem guided by the New Mobilities Paradigm and the Mobile Methods, supported by the recent field of knowledge of the Sociology of Mobility. Unlike the predominant discourse related to the bicycle, in which the "new" modal is associated with freedom, simplicity, economy, ease, and practicality, the results found point out that this is only one facet of the experience of cyclists in a city with a high index of inequality as São Paulo, circumscribed to a group of cyclists that circulate in certain social spaces. Making use of the concept of motility arising from a critical view based on the New Mobilities Paradigm, it is argued that although the bicycle has been associated in recent years with freedom and right to the city by its users, in many cases the city experience by cycling is aggressive, uncomfortable, dangerous and harmful to health. The bicycle is the only instrument through which an impoverished portion of the population, living in peripheral regions, is able to access work, leisure, goods, and services of the city. On the other hand, residents of central districts enjoy the largest percentage of existing bicycle infrastructure and use the bicycle as another mode of transportation in their range of options. The research also enabled some methodological innovations, in the form of a tool developed for data collection. Finally, when thinking about the planning of a public policy that concerns the Urban Mobility System, it is necessary to pinpoint the bicycle as one more device inserted within a collective transportation system that did not include the exponential growth of the city and its metropolitan region, making it disconnected, obsolete and at the margin of the daily needs of its users. In order for the bicycle's benefits to impact the city's population on a large scale, it is essential that it be designed and planned as an element adding to the complex mobility network of São Paulo - amid transport rail systems, buses, private cars, and walk -, and not simply as a tool that serves this systems.

The goal of this study was to test the preference
of Dodonaea viscosa (L.) Jacq. by disturbed areas of
restinga in southern coast of the Espírito Santo as well as
if higher disturbance levels increase its abundance.
Populations of this species were analyzed in three
sections of shrubby vegetation with different histories of
man-made disturbance in the Parque Estadual Paulo
César Vinha. In each section were installed four transects
of 10 x 100 m subdivided into 10 contiguous quadrat
plots of 100 m². Inside these plots all individuals of D.
viscosa with height ≥ 20 cm were quantified. The
abundance was significantly higher in the section with a
history of severe disturbance and in plots closer to the
edge of Park, indicating the preference of D. viscosa by
disturbed areas and the positive relationship between
abundance and disturbance level.

Non-myrmecophilous lepidopteran larvae using plants bearing ant attractants such as extrafloral nectaries are good models for studying morphological and behavioural mechanisms against ant predation. Udranomia spitzi (Hesperiidae) is a butterfly whose larvae feed on leaves of Ouratea spectabilis (Ochnaceae), a plant with extrafloral nectaries. We described the early stages of U. spitzi, and used field observations and experiments to investigate the defensive strategies of caterpillars against predatory ants. Larvae pass through five instars and pupation occurs inside larval leaf shelters. Ant-exclusion experiments revealed that the presence of ants did not affect significantly caterpillar survival. Predation experiments showed that vulnerability to ant predation decreased with increase in larval size. The present study showed that predatory ants are not as relevant as demonstrated for other systems, and also illustrates how observational data and field experiments can contribute to a better understanding of the biology and ecology of a species of interest.

Whistle emissions were recorded from small groups of marine tucuxi dolphins (Sotalia fluviatilis) in two beaches located in an important biological reserve in the Cananéia estuary (25 degrees 03'S, 47 degrees 58'W), southeastern Brazil. A total of 17 h of acoustic data was collected when dolphins were engaged in a specific feeding foraging activity. The amount of 3235 whistles was recorded and 40% (n=1294) were analyzed. Seven acoustic whistle parameters were determined: duration (ms), number of inflection points, start and end frequency (kHz), minimum and maximum frequency (kHz), and frequency range (kHz). Whistles with up to four inflection points were found. Whistles with no inflection points and rising frequency corresponded to 85% (n=1104) of all analyzed whistles. Whistle duration varied from 38 to 627 ms (mean=229.6+/-109.9 ms), with the start frequency varying between 1 and 16 kHz (mean=8.16+/-3.0 kHz) and the end frequency between 2 and 18 kHz (mean=14.35+/-3.0 kHz). The importance of this study requires an accurate measurement of the whistles' emissions in an unusual foraging feeding behavior situation on two beaches where several tucuxis, mostly mother-calf pairs, are frequently present. These two beaches are located in a federal and state environment Environmental Protected Area threatened by the progressive increase of tourism.

... Santos et al., 2003), contaminant loads (Yogui et al., 2003), social organization (Santos, 2004), and acoustics (Pivari and Rosso, 2005 ... must be considered since such flexibility demands behavioral mechanisms for which the individual is engaged with the environment (Lott, 1984 ...