Page 10 of 17
Individuals of the same age can differ substantially in the degree to which they have accumulated tissue damage, akin to bodily wear and tear, from past experiences. This accumulated tissue damage reflects the...
Spiders are important arthropod predators in many terrestrial ecosystems, and molecular tools have boosted our ability to investigate this taxon, which can be difficult to study with conventional methods. None...
In most species, acoustical cues are crucial for mother-offspring recognition. Studies of a few species of ungulates showed that potential for individual recognition may differ between nasal and oral contact c...
During larval settlement and metamorphosis, marine invertebrates undergo changes in habitat, morphology, behavior and physiology. This change between life-cycle stages is often associated with a change in diet...
Calanus finmarchicus, a highly abundant copepod that is an important primary consumer in North Atlantic ecosystems, has a flexible life history in which copepods in the last juvenile developmental stage (fifth co...
Exposure to elevated seawater PCO2 limits the thermal tolerance of crustaceans but the underlying mechanisms have not been comprehensively explored. Larval stages of crustaceans are even more sensitive to environ...
Individual recognition and winner/loser effects both play important roles in animal contests, but how their influences are integrated to affect an individual’s contest decisions in combination remains unclear....
The shipworm Lyrodus pedicellatus is a wood-boring bivalve with an unusual vermiform body. Although its larvae are brooded, they retain the general appearance of a typical bivalve veliger-type larva. Here, we des...
Comparatively few data are available concerning the structure of the adult nervous system in the Ectoprocta or Bryozoa. In contrast to all other ectoprocts, the cerebral ganglion of phylactolaemates contains a...
No abstract
The original article was published in Frontiers in Zoology 2014 11:69
Sexually selected traits contribute substantially to evolutionary diversification, for example by promoting assortative mating. The contributing traits and their relevance for reproductive isolation differ bet...
Chaetognatha are a phylum of marine carnivorous animals which includes more than 130 extant species. The internal systematics of this group have been intensively debated since it was discovered in the 18th centur...
Osmotic stress transcription factor 1 (Ostf1) was first discovered by subtractive hybridization in the gills of Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) transferred from fresh water (FW) to seawater (SW). It ...
Deep-sea alvinellid worm species endemic to hydrothermal vents, such as Alvinella and Paralvinella, are considered to be among the most thermotolerant animals known with their adaptability to toxic heavy metals, ...
Phylogenetic and population genetic studies often deal with multiple sequence alignments that require manipulation or processing steps such as sequence concatenation, sequence renaming, sequence translation or...
Urbanization can considerably impact animal ecology, evolution, and behavior. Among the new conditions that animals experience in cities is anthropogenic noise, which can limit the sound space available for an...
Food availability is an important environmental cue for animals for deciding how much to invest in reproduction, and it ultimately affects population size. The importance of food limitation has been extensivel...
Chemosensory signals play a vital role in socio-sexual interactions of rodents. Females rely heavily on chemosensory signals to evaluate genetic similarity and quality of potential mates, but their olfactory p...
Umami and sweet tastes are two important basic taste perceptions that allow animals to recognize diets with nutritious carbohydrates and proteins, respectively. Until recently, analyses of umami and sweet tast...
Several alpine vertebrates share a distribution pattern that extends across the South-western Palearctic but is limited to the main mountain massifs. Although they are usually regarded as cold-adapted species,...
The popular view on insect sociality is that of a harmonious division of labor among two morphologically distinct and functionally non-overlapping castes. But this is a highly derived state and not a prerequis...
The carbonic anhydrase (CA; EC 4.2.1.1) superfamily is a class of ubiquitous metallo-enzymes that catalyse the reversible hydration of carbon dioxide. The α-CA family, present in all metazoan clades, is a key ...
Many species of ambystomatid salamanders are dependent upon highly variable temporary wetlands for larval development. High larval densities may prompt the expression of a distinct head morphology that may fac...
Since its introduction from Taiwan to Europe around 1980, Anguillicola crassus, a natural parasite of the Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica), has acquired the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) as a novel definitive ...
The spectacular discovery of the new insect order Mantophasmatodea in 2002 was immediately followed by detailed studies on morphology and scattered information on different aspects of its behavior and general ...
No abstract.
Limnognathia maerski is the single species of the recently described taxon, Micrognathozoa. The most conspicuous character of this animal is the complex set of jaws, which resembles an even more intricate version...
Climate and environmental change have driven widespread changes in body size, particularly declines, across a range of taxonomic groups in recent decades. Size declines could substantially impact on the functi...
The Erratum to this article has been published in Frontiers in Zoology 2014 11:88
The calcareous shells of brachiopods offer a wealth of informative characters for taxonomic and phylogenetic investigations. In particular scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has been used for decades to visual...
No abstract.
Tardigrades are an ancient lineage of microinvertebrates with a unique metameric pattern consisting of a head and four lobopodal leg-bearing segments. While their close relationship to Onychophora and Arthropo...
Freshwater fishes of the genus Esox are found throughout the Holarctic region. The northern pike (E. lucius) has a circumpolar distribution whereas the assumed sister species the Amur pike (E. reichertii) is only...
Many prey species around the world are suffering declines due to a variety of interacting causes such as land use change, climate change, invasive species and novel disease. Recent studies on the ecological ro...
When birds fly in cluttered environments, they must tailor their flight to the gaps that they traverse. We trained budgerigars, Melopsittacus undulatus, to fly through a vertically oriented gap of variable width,...
Molluscan shells exhibit a wide diversity of pigmentation patterns and are often used as models for understanding the mechanisms underlying biological pattern formation. Numerous mathematical models have been ...
In previous work, the authors described a software package for the digitisation of 3D landmarks for use in geometric morphometrics. In this paper, we describe extensions to this software that allow semi-automa...
The success of a taxonomic group can be promoted by a key character that allows the group to interact with its environment in a different way and to potentially occupy new niches. The Pomacentridae possess a s...
Daphnia magna exhibits a parthenogenetic reproductive cycle linked to a moulting cycle, but regulatory mechanisms of neither moulting nor reproductive cycle are understood in daphnids. Moulting is regulated by ec...
Chitin is a biopolymer that forms the exoskeleton of arthropods, and is found in the cell walls of fungi. It has a wide range of uses in fields such as cosmetics, pharmacy, medicine, bioengineering, agricultur...
Many arthropods add body segments post-embryonically, including most of the myriapods. However, geophilomorph and scolopendromorph centipedes are epimorphic, i.e. they form all their segments during embryonic ...
Short post-reproductive lifespan is widespread across species, but prolonged post-reproductive life-stages of potential adaptive significance have been reported only in few mammals with extreme longevity. Long...
The practice of molecular dating is an essential tool for hypothesis testing in evolutionary biology. Vagaries of fossilization and taphonomic bias commonly engender high uncertainty in molecular dating in tax...
The vertebrate brain is a highly energy consuming organ that requires continuous energy provision. Energy metabolism of ectothermic organisms is directly affected by environmental temperature changes and has b...
Cephalopods have evolved strong acid–base regulatory abilities to cope with CO2 induced pH fluctuations in their extracellular compartments to protect gas transport via highly pH sensitive hemocyanins. To date, t...
Morphological integration and modularity depend on genetic covariation between traits, which emerges from pleiotropic effects of single loci and genetic linkage between loci. Since chromosomal reorganizations ...
In contact zones, genetic mixing of two taxa can be restricted by prezygotic (e.g. assortative mating) or postzygotic (lower fitness of hybrid offspring) barriers, or a combination of the two. A hybrid zone be...
Nemertodermatida is the sister group of the Acoela, which together form the Acoelomorpha, a taxon that comprises bilaterally symmetric, small aquatic worms. While there are several descriptions of the embryolo...
All bird eggs are exposed to microbes in the environment, which if transmitted to the developing embryo, could cause hatching failure. However, the risk of trans-shell infection varies with environmental condi...
As an ecological adaptation venoms have evolved independently in several species of Metazoa. As haematophagous arthropods ticks are mainly considered as ectoparasites due to directly feeding on the skin of ani...
The transfer of antibodies from mother to offspring is key to protecting young animals from disease and can have a major impact on responses to infection and offspring fitness. Such maternal effects also allow...
Frontiers in Zoology