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In parent-offspring communication, vocal signals are often used to attract attention and offspring might call to induce parental behaviour. In guinea pigs (Cavia aperea f. porcellus) mothers wean larger litters l...
Identification of DNA sequence diversity is a powerful means for assessing the species present in environmental samples. The most common molecular strategies for estimating taxonomic composition depend upon PC...
Eicosanoids are biologically active, oxygenated metabolites of three C20 polyunsaturated fatty acids. They act as signalling molecules within the autocrine or paracrine system in both vertebrates and invertebr...
In the Lepidoptera it was historically believed that adult butterflies rely primarily on larval-derived nutrients for reproduction and somatic maintenance. However, recent studies highlight the complex interac...
Frogs primitively have a biphasic life history with an aquatic larva (tadpole) and a usually terrestrial adult. However, direct developing frogs of the genus Eleutherodactylus have lost a free living larval stage...
During long-distance foraging in almost featureless habitats desert ants of the genus Cataglyphis employ path-integrating mechanisms (vector navigation). This navigational strategy requires an egocentric monitori...
In adult male Marcusenius pongolensis the duration of their Electric Organ Discharge (EOD) pulses increases with body size over lifetime (267 to 818 μs, field-measured). Spawning males have been observed to exhib...
The planarian Schmidtea mediterranea and the cnidarian Hydra vulgaris have emerged as valuable model organisms in regeneration and stem cell research because of their prominent ability to regenerate a complete or...
The development of specialized appendages involved in sperm transfer in the males of julid millipedes is an extreme case of specialized, complex structures differentiating in a very advanced phase of post-embr...
Foraging behaviour is an essential ecological process linking different trophic levels. A central assumption of foraging theory is that food selection maximises the fitness of the consumer. It remains unknown,...
The evolution of reproductive traits, such as hybrid incompatibility (postzygotic isolation) and species recognition (prezygotic isolation), have shown their key role in speciation. Theoretical modeling has re...
Host-parasite interactions are among the most important biotic relationships. Host species should evolve mechanisms to detect their enemies and employ appropriate counterstrategies. Parasites, in turn, should ...
The standard textbook information that annelid musculature consists of oligochaete-like outer circular and inner longitudinal muscle-layers has recently been called into question by observations of a variety o...
Recent genome sequence analysis in the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum indicated that this highly crepuscular animal encodes only two single opsin paralogs: a UV-opsin and a long wavelength (LW)-opsin; howev...
Owls are known for their silent flight. Even though there is some information available on the mechanisms that lead to a reduction of noise emission, neither the morphological basis, nor the biological mechani...
The retention of ancestral juvenile characters by adult stages of descendants is called paedomorphosis. However, this process can mislead phylogenetic analyses based on morphological data, even in combination ...
Marine cleaning interactions in which cleaner fish or shrimps remove parasites from visiting 'client' reef fish are a textbook example of mutualism. However, there is yet no conclusive evidence that cleaning o...
Accurate formal taxonomic designations are thought to be of critical importance for the conservation of endangered taxa. The Galápagos sea lion (GSL), being appreciated as a key element of the Galápagos marine...
Understanding the demographic processes underlying population dynamics is a central theme in ecology. Populations decline if losses from the population (i.e., mortality and emigration) exceed gains (i.e., recr...
The marine annelid Platynereis dumerilii (Polychaeta, Nereididae) has been recognized as a slow-evolving lophotrochozoan that attracts increasing attention as a valuable model for evolutionary and developmental r...
In simultaneous hermaphrodites with copulation and internal fertilization it is often unclear whether reciprocal sperm exchange results from the unconditional willingness of both partners to donate and receive...
Vertebrate epithelial cells typically express a specific set of keratins. In teleosts, keratins are also present in a variety of mesenchymal cells, which usually express vimentin. Significantly, our previous s...
The clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa) is one of the least known cat species and depletion of their forested habitats puts it under heavy pressure. Recently reclassification of Bornean clouded leopards (N. nebul...
The Chaetognatha (arrow worms) are a group of marine carnivores whose phylogenetic relationships are still vigorously debated. Molecular studies have as yet failed to come up with a stable hypothesis on their ...
Unisexuality, or all female reproduction, is rare among vertebrates. Studying these exceptional organisms may give useful information with respect to the evolution and maintenance of sexual reproduction. Poecilia...
Desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) are central place foragers that navigate by means of path integration. This mechanism remains accurate even on three-dimensional itineraries. In this study, we tested three hypoth...
The climatic cycles with subsequent glacial and intergalcial periods have had a great impact on the distribution and evolution of species. Using genetic analytical tools considerably increased our understandin...
Hox genes are expressed in specific domains along the anterior posterior body axis and define the regional identity. In most animals these genes are organized in a single cluster in the genome and the order of...
Flatworms are characterized by an outstanding stem cell system. These stem cells (neoblasts) can give rise to all cell types including germ cells and power the exceptional regenerative capacity of many flatwor...
DNA barcoding, i.e. the use of a 648 bp section of the mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase I, has recently been promoted as useful for the rapid identification and discovery of species. Its success is depende...
Social insects (ants, bees, wasps and termites) are considered as prime examples of altruism in which individuals (workers) forego their own reproduction to help other individuals reproduce. Such a behaviour i...
Identification of species via DNA sequences is the basis for DNA taxonomy and DNA barcoding. Currently there is a strong focus on using a mitochondrial marker for this purpose, in particular a fragment from th...
The Radical Pair model proposes that magnetoreception is a light-dependent process. Under low monochromatic light from the short-wavelength part of the visual spectrum, migratory birds show orientation in thei...
The lack of obvious morphological differences between species impedes the identification of species in many groups of organisms. Meanwhile, DNA-based approaches are increasingly used to survey biological diver...
The preference – performance hypothesis predicts that oviposition preference of insects should correlate with host suitability for offspring development. Therefore, insect females have to be able to assess not...
Effective approaches for the management and conservation of wildlife populations require a sound knowledge of population demographics, and this is often only possible through mark-recapture studies. We applied...
The genus Mantella, endemic poison frogs of Madagascar with 16 described species, are known in the field of international pet trade and entered under the CITES control for the last four years. The phylogeny and p...
Odors are represented by specific spatio-temporal activity patterns in the olfactory bulb of vertebrates and its insect analogue, the antennal lobe. In honeybees inhibitory circuits in the AL are involved in t...
The two sympatric species of Tunisian desert ants, Cataglyphis bicolor and C. mauritanica, do not exhibit any differences in their foraging ecology, e.g. in food preferences and in their spatial and temporal acti...
Insect ears contain very different numbers of sensory cells, from only one sensory cell in some moths to thousands of sensory cells, e.g. in cicadas. These differences still await functional explanation and es...
The question of arthropod head segmentation has become one of the central issues in Evolutionary Developmental Biology. The number of theories pertaining to head segments progressively enlarges, old concepts h...
Researchers have developed a variety of techniques for the visual presentation of quantitative data. These techniques can help to reveal trends and regularities that would be difficult to see if the data were ...
Nests are built in various animal taxa including fish. In systems with exclusive male parental care, the choice of a nest site may be an important component of male fitness. The nest site may influence male at...
To understand the evolution of animals it is essential to have taxon sampling across a representative spread of the animal kingdom. With the recent rearrangement of most of the Bilateria into three major clade...
Geometric morphometric methods of capturing information about curves or outlines of organismal structures may be used in conjunction with canonical variates analysis (CVA) to assign specimens to groups or popu...
The nematode Pristionchus pacificus has been developed as a satellite organism in evolutionary developmental biology for comparison to Caenorhabditis elegans. Comparative studies have revealed major differences i...
Mitochondrial (mt) gene arrangement is highly variable among molluscs and especially among bivalves. Of the 30 complete molluscan mt-genomes published to date, only one is of a heterodont bivalve, although thi...
In many birds, day length (=photoperiod) regulates reproductive cycle. The photoperiodic environment varies between different seasons and latitudes. As a consequence, species at different latitudes may have ev...
Poorly preserved biological tissues have become an important source of DNA for a wide range of zoological studies. Measuring the quality of DNA obtained from these samples is often desired; however, there are ...
In eastern North America two common colour morphs exist in most populations of redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus). Previous studies have indicated that the different morphs may be adapted to different therm...
Frontiers in Zoology