Habitat quality is one main trigger for the persistence of butterflies. The effects of the influencing biotic and abiotic factors may be enhanced by the challenging conditions in high-alpine environments. To b...
Authors: Stefan Ehl, Niklas Böhm, Manuel Wörner, László Rákosy and Thomas Schmitt
Only a few studies have examined the visual systems of Amblypygi (whip spiders) until now. To get new insights suitable for phylogenetic analysis we studied the axonal trajectories and neuropil architecture of...
Upon the detection of imminent peril, pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum) often drop off their host plant. Dropping in response to insect enemies is intermittent in nature, but when a mammalian herbivore feeds on th...
Trait based functional and community ecology is en vogue. Most studies, however, ignore phenotypical diversity by characterizing entire species considering only trait means rather than their variability. Phenotyp...
Authors: Adrian Brückner, Romina Schuster, Katja Wehner and Michael Heethoff
Parental effects may produce adaptive or maladaptive plasticity that either facilitates persistence or increases the extinction risk of species and populations in a changing climate. However, empirical evidenc...
Authors: Bao-Jun Sun, Yang Wang, Yong Wang, Hong-Liang Lu and Wei-Guo Du
Among bryozoans, cyclostome anatomy is the least studied by modern methods. New data on the nervous system fill the gap in our knowledge and make morphological analysis much more fruitful to resolve some quest...
In the general model of sex chromosome evolution for diploid dioecious organisms, the Y (or W) chromosome is derived, while the homogametic sex presumably represents the ancestral condition. However, in the fr...
Amphibian defence against predators and microorganisms is directly related to cutaneous glands that produce a huge number of different toxins. These glands are distributed throughout the body but can form accu...
Authors: Pedro Luiz Mailho-Fontana, Marta Maria Antoniazzi, Juliana Mozer Sciani, Daniel Carvalho Pimenta, Katia Cristina Barbaro and Carlos Jared
It is widely assumed that variation in fitness components has a physiological basis that might underlie selection on trade-offs, but the mechanisms driving decreased survival and future fecundity remain elusiv...
Authors: Melinda A. Fowler, Mélissa Paquet, Véronique Legault, Alan A. Cohen and Tony D. Williams
The mechanism that determines the specific body size of an animal is a fundamental biological question that remains largely unanswered. This aspect is now beginning to be understood in insect models, particula...
Species delineation is particularly challenging in taxa with substantial intra-specific variation. In systematic studies of fishes, meristics and linear measurements that describe shape are often used to delin...
Authors: Maarten Van Steenberge, Joost André Maria Raeymaekers, Pascal István Hablützel, Maarten Pieterjan Maria Vanhove, Stephan Koblmüller and Jos Snoeks
A number of shelled and shell-less gastropods are known to use multiple defensive mechanisms, including internally generated or externally obtained biochemically active compounds and structures. Within Nudiple...
Authors: Jessica A. Goodheart, Sabrina Bleidißel, Dorothee Schillo, Ellen E. Strong, Daniel L. Ayres, Angelika Preisfeld, Allen G. Collins, Michael P. Cummings and Heike Wägele
For brown bears (Ursus arctos), hibernation is a critical part of the annual life cycle because energy savings during hibernation can be crucial for overwintering, and females give birth to cubs at that time. For...
Authors: M M Delgado, G Tikhonov, E Meyke, M Babushkin, T Bespalova, S Bondarchuk, A Esengeldenova, I Fedchenko, Y Kalinkin, A Knorre, G Kosenkov, V Kozsheechkin, A Kuznetsov, E Larin, D Mirsaitov, I Prokosheva…
Birds, across their annual cycle, progress through sequences of life-history stages such as reproduction and molt. The mechanisms that control annual avian itineraries involve endocrine responses triggered by ...
Authors: Rene Quispe, Elizabeth Yohannes and Manfred Gahr
The facial musculature is a remarkable anatomical complex involved in vital activities of fishes, such as food capture and gill ventilation. The evolution of the facial muscles is largely unknown in most major...
Density estimation is a key issue in wildlife management but is particularly challenging and labour-intensive for elusive species. Recently developed approaches based on remotely collected data and capture-rec...
Authors: Luca Mattioli, Antonio Canu, Daniela Passilongo, Massimo Scandura and Marco Apollonio
Interspecies variation in avian egg shape and size is understandable in terms of adaptation, allometry and phylogeny. Within-species variation in egg properties influences offspring fitness and can be explaine...
Authors: Mirosława Bańbura, Michał Glądalski, Adam Kaliński, Marcin Markowski, Joanna Skwarska, Jarosław Wawrzyniak, Piotr Zieliński and Jerzy Bańbura
A median, segmented, annelid nerve cord has repeatedly been compared to the arthropod and vertebrate nerve cords and became the most used textbook representation of the annelid nervous system. Recent phylogeno...
Authors: Conrad Helm, Patrick Beckers, Thomas Bartolomaeus, Stephan H. Drukewitz, Ioannis Kourtesis, Anne Weigert, Günter Purschke, Katrine Worsaae, Torsten H. Struck and Christoph Bleidorn
As a small artiodactyl, the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus L.) is characterized by biological plasticity and great adaptability demonstrated by their survival under a wide variety of environmental conditions. In o...
Authors: Svetlana Milošević-Zlatanović, Tanja Vukov, Srđan Stamenković, Marija Jovanović and Nataša Tomašević Kolarov
Throughout life, physiological homeostasis is challenged and the capacity to cope with such challenges declines with increasing age. In many species, sex differences exist in life expectancy. Sex-specific diff...
Authors: V. Behringer, J. M. G. Stevens, T. Deschner, R. Sonnweber and G. Hohmann
Immature stages of many animals can forage and feed on their own, whereas others depend on their parents’ assistance to obtain or process food. But how does such dependency evolve, and which offspring and pare...
Authors: Alexandra Capodeanu-Nägler, Madlen A. Prang, Stephen T. Trumbo, Heiko Vogel, Anne-Katrin Eggert, Scott K. Sakaluk and Sandra Steiger
Noise pollution is one of the leading environmental health risks for humans, linked to a myriad of stress-related health problems. Yet little is known about the long-term effects of noise on the health and fit...
Authors: A. M. Dorado-Correa, S.A. Zollinger, B. Heidinger and H. Brumm
Tree frogs have the remarkable ability to attach to smooth, rough, dry, and wet surfaces using their versatile toe pads. Tree frog attachment involves the secretion of mucus into the pad-substrate gap, requiri...
Authors: Julian K. A. Langowski, Dimitra Dodou, Marleen Kamperman and Johan L. van Leeuwen
While thousands of ant species are arboreal, very few are able to chew and tunnel through living wood. Ants of the genus Melissotarsus (subfamily Myrmicinae) inhabit tunnel systems excavated under the bark of liv...
Authors: Adam Khalife, Roberto A. Keller, Johan Billen, Francisco Hita Garcia, Evan P. Economo and Christian Peeters
Macroinvertebrates such as non-biting midges (Chironomidae: Diptera) are important components of freshwater ecosystems. However, they are often neglected in biodiversity and conservation research because inver...
Authors: Bilgenur Baloğlu, Esther Clews and Rudolf Meier
The neuromuscular junction is the chemical synapse where motor neurons communicate with skeletal muscle fibers. Whereas vertebrates and many invertebrates use acetylcholine as transmitter at the neuromuscular ...
Authors: Hendrik Langeloh, Hannah Wasser, Nicole Richter, Gerd Bicker and Michael Stern
The life history stages of brachyuran crustaceans include pelagic larvae of the Zoea type which grow by a series of moults from one instar to the next. Zoeae actively feed and possess a wide range of organ sys...
Authors: Franziska Spitzner, Rebecca Meth, Christina Krüger, Emanuel Nischik, Stefan Eiler, Andy Sombke, Gabriela Torres and Steffen Harzsch
Enteropneusts are benthic marine invertebrates that belong to the deuterostome phylum Hemichordata. The two main clades of enteropneusts are defined by differences in early life history strategies. In the Spen...
Authors: Paul Gonzalez, Jeffrey Z. Jiang and Christopher J. Lowe
Prenatal antibody transfer is an immune-mediated maternal effect by which females can shape postnatal offspring resistance to pathogens and parasites. Maternal antibodies passed on to offspring provide primary...
Authors: Rafał Martyka, Ewa B. Śliwińska, Mirosław Martyka, Mariusz Cichoń and Piotr Tryjanowski
Myoanatomical studies of adult bryozoans employing fluorescent staining and confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) have been chiefly conducted on freshwater bryozoans. The diversity of muscular systems in t...
Whether the great morphological disparity of domesticated forms is the result of uniformly higher evolutionary rates compared to the wild populations is debated. We provide new data on changes of skull dimensi...
Authors: Madeleine Geiger and Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra
Cuticular hydrocarbons (CHC) have been documented to play crucial roles as species- and sex-specific cues in the chemical communication systems of a wide variety of insects. However, whether they are sufficien...
Authors: Jan Buellesbach, Sebastian G. Vetter and Thomas Schmitt
Rhinorhipidae Lawrence, 1988 is an enigmatic beetle family represented by a single species, Rhinorhipus tamborinensis Lawrence, 1988, from Australia, with poorly established affinities near the superfamily Elater...
Authors: Dominik Kusy, Michal Motyka, Carmelo Andujar, Matej Bocek, Michal Masek, Katerina Sklenarova, Filip Kokas, Milada Bocakova, Alfried P. Vogler and Ladislav Bocak
The European spurge hawkmoth, Hyles euphorbiae (Lepidoptera, Sphingidae), has been intensively studied as a model organism for insect chemical ecology, cold hardiness and evolution of species delineation. To unde...
Authors: M. Benjamin Barth, Katja Buchwalder, Akito Y. Kawahara, Xin Zhou, Shanlin Liu, Nicolas Krezdorn, Björn Rotter, Ralf Horres and Anna K. Hundsdoerfer
We summarise our work on male mating behaviour in the tropical butterfly Bicyclus anynana, responding to the commentary provided by Nieberding and Holveck. We acknowledge that our laboratory studies are not free ...
Authors: Klaus Fischer, Isabell Karl, Ian A. N. Dublon and Tobias Kehl
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2018
15:19
Published on: 27 April 2018
The
original article was published in Frontiers in Zoology
2018
15:18
Over the last years, several studies suggested that male courtship activity is more important than female preference for male secondary sexual traits in determining male mating success in the butterfly Bicyclu...
Authors: Caroline Marie Nieberding and Marie-Jeanne Holveck
Despite widespread interest in solar-powered sea slugs (Sacoglossa: Gastropoda), relatively little is know about how they actually perform functional kleptoplasty. Sister-taxa Elysia timida and E. cornigera provi...
Authors: Elise Marie Jerschabek Laetz and Heike Wägele
The MHC class I and II loci mediate the adaptive immune response and belong to the most polymorphic loci in vertebrate genomes. In fact, the number of different alleles in a given species is often so large tha...
Authors: Miriam Linnenbrink, Meike Teschke, Inka Montero, Marie Vallier and Diethard Tautz
Exploratory behaviour is one of the best-investigated behavioural traits. However, little is known about how differences in familiarity, i.e. in the knowledge and previous experience with a companion can influ...
Authors: Beniamino Tuliozi, Gerardo Fracasso, Herbert Hoi and Matteo Griggio
In horses, the morphological changes induced by the process of domestication are reportedly less pronounced than in other species, such as dogs or pigs – although the horses’ disparity has rarely been empirica...
Authors: Laura Heck, Laura A. B. Wilson, Allowen Evin, Madlen Stange and Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra
The social environment that mothers experience during pregnancy and lactation has a strong effect on the developing offspring. Whether offspring can be adaptively shaped to match an environment that is similar...
Authors: Susanne Sangenstedt, Carsten Szardenings, Norbert Sachser and Sylvia Kaiser
The grey wolf (Canis lupus) is naturally recolonizing its former habitats in Europe where it was extirpated during the previous two centuries. The management of this protected species is often controversial and i...
Authors: Morgane Papin, Julian Pichenot, François Guérold and Estelle Germain
Upon publication of this article [1] it was noticed errors were introduced during the production process which resulted in the omission of decimal points from Tables 2 and 3. In addition Table 1 incorrectly us...
Authors: Przemysław Gorzelak, Aurélie Dery, Philippe Dubois and Jarosław Stolarski
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2018
15:12
Published on: 12 April 2018
The
original article was published in Frontiers in Zoology
2017
14:42
Bivalves comprise a large, highly diverse taxon of invertebrate species. Developmental studies of neurogenesis among species of Bivalvia are limited. Due to a lack of neurogenesis information, it is difficult ...
Authors: Olga V. Yurchenko, Olga I. Skiteva, Elena E. Voronezhskaya and Vyacheslav A. Dyachuk
Foraging strategies of seabird species often vary considerably between and within individuals. This variability is influenced by a multitude of factors including age, sex, stage of annual life cycle, reproduct...
Authors: Dariusz Jakubas, Lech M. Iliszko, Hallvard Strøm, Halfdan H. Helgason and Lech Stempniewicz
Host-symbiont interactions are embedded in ecological communities and range from unspecific to highly specific relationships. Army ants and their arthropod guests represent a fascinating example of species-ric...
Authors: Christoph von Beeren, Adrian Brückner, Munetoshi Maruyama, Griffin Burke, Jana Wieschollek and Daniel J. C. Kronauer
Sea spiders (Pycnogonida) are a widespread and phylogenetically important group of marine arthropods. However, their biology remains understudied, and detailed information about their feeding ecology is diffic...
Authors: Lars Dietz, Jana S. Dömel, Florian Leese, Tobias Lehmann and Roland R. Melzer
Acoustic parameters of animal signals have been shown to correlate with various phenotypic characteristics of the sender. These acoustic characteristics can be learned and categorized and thus are a basis for ...
Authors: Markus Boeckle, Georgine Szipl and Thomas Bugnyar
In rats, urine-borne male pheromones comprise organic volatile compounds and major urinary proteins (MUPs). A number of volatile pheromones have been reported, but no MUP pheromones have been identified in rat...
Authors: Xiao Guo, Huifen Guo, Lei Zhao, Yao-Hua Zhang and Jian-Xu Zhang
Communal nursing in house mice is an example of cooperation where females pool litters in the same nest and indiscriminately nurse own and other offspring despite potential exploitation. The direct fitness ben...
Authors: Nicola Harrison, Anna K. Lindholm, Akos Dobay, Olivia Halloran, Andri Manser and Barbara König
