The purpose of the study, carried out in the years 2001–2003 was to determine which fungal species inhabited decaying grapevine cuttings during callusing and soon after planting them into pots. The plant material was collected from 5 commercial plantations and 8 cultivars, which were most frequently cultivated. From each plantation and cultivar 20 cuttings with symptoms of the growth inhibition or decay were randomly sampled during the callusing period i.e. March/April (term I) and 2–3 months after planting the cuttings into pots i.e. June/July (term II). The results showed that from affected grapevine cuttings Phomopsis viticola, Botrytis cinerea, Alternaria alternata and Fusarium spp. were isolated most frequently. Moreover, it was found that after planting young cuttings into the pots, numerous isolates of soil borne pathogenes were obtained, among others Cylindrocarpon spp., Phytophthora sp., Rhizoctonia solani, Fusarium spp.

Perception takes into account the costs and benefits of possible interpretations of incoming sensory data. This should be especially pertinent for threat recognition, where minimising the costs associated with missing a real threat is of primary importance. We tested whether recognition of threats has special characteristics that adapt this process to the task it fulfils. Participants were presented with images of threats and visually matched neutral stimuli, distorted by varying levels of noise. We found threat superiority effect and liberal response bias. Moreover, increasing the level of noise degraded the recognition of the neutral images to higher extent than the threatening images. To summarise, recognising threats is special, in that it is more resistant to noise and decline in stimulus quality, suggesting that threat recognition is a fast ‘all or nothing’ process, in which threat presence is either confirmed or negated.