A Record of the Invasive Golden Apple Snail Pomacea canaliculata (Lamarck 1819) at Black Dragon Spring,Dianchi Basin

The golden apple snail Pomacea canaliculata （Lamarck 1819） was first recorded at Black Dragon Spring, Dianchi Basin, Baiyi Township, Songming County, Kunming City, Yunnan Province, China, in October 2004. The water from the spring flows into the Songhuaba Reservoir, the major drinking water resource for Kunming City, and part of the Dianchi Lake basin. This is the first record of this invasive snail in the Dianchi Lake Basin. Pomacea canaliculata originates from Central and South America, and in Asia the snail has spread through deliberate and accidental introductions to the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Korea, Japan and South China. It has become a major pest in rice-growing areas, resulting in huge damage to crops. Strict prevention and control measures have to be implemented to prevent the spread of the snail in Yunnan, together with public awareness campaigns to inform the public of the dangers of this invasive snail.

Effects of the molluscicide can didate PPU06 on alkaline phosphatase in the golden apple snails determined using a near-infrared fluorescent probe

We constructed a reaction-based near-infrared fluorescent probe(Niap) to specifically identify alkaline phosphatase(ALP) with fast red fluorescence enhancement.Based on the positive concentrationdependent manner between the fluorescent intensity of the Niap and ALP,probe Niap was used to study the ALP enrichment and variation in golden apple snails(Pomacea canaliculata) exposed to the molluscicide candidate PPU06.After treatment with different concentrations of PPU06 over various times,three organs of the surviving snails,liver,stomach and plantaris,were frozen and sectioned for fluorescent imaging experiments.With increased PPU06 concentration,red fluorescence substantially increased in the liver and reached a maximum within 24 h when the PPU06 co ncentration was 0.75 mg/L.No obvious changes in the stomach or foot plantaris were found.It showed PPU06 caused liver injury and stimulated the increase of ALP in the liver of P.canaliculata.This study demonstrates a rapid ALP fluorescent identification method that can be used to study the effects of PPU06 on P.canaliculata.It also provides optical evidence that may aid in the discovery of new chemistry for snail control.

Computer vision-based apple grading for golden delicious apples based on surface features

In this paper,a computer vision-based algorithm for golden delicious apple grading is proposed which works in six steps.Non-apple pixels as background are firstly removed from input images.Then,stem end is detected by combination of morphological methods and Mahalanobis distant classifier.Calyx region is also detected by applying K-means clustering on the Cb component in YCbCr color space.After that,defects segmentation is achieved using Multi-Layer Perceptron(MLP)neural network.In the next step,stem end and calyx regions are removed from defected regions to refine and improve apple grading process.Then,statistical,textural and geometric features from refined defected regions are extracted.Finally,for apple grading,a comparison between performance of Support Vector Machine(SVM),MLP and K-Nearest Neighbor(KNN)classifiers is done.Classification is done in two manners which in the first one,an input apple is classified into two categories of healthy and defected.In the second manner,the input apple is classified into three categories of first rank,second rank and rejected ones.In both grading steps,SVM classifier works as the best one with recognition rate of 92.5%and 89.2%for two categories(healthy and defected)and three quality categories(first rank,second rank and rejected ones),among 120 different golden delicious apple images,respectively,considering K-folding with K=5.Moreover,the accuracy of the proposed segmentation algorithms including stem end detection and calyx detection are evaluated for two different apple image databases.