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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...
The sex of many reptiles is determined by the temperature an embryo experiences during its development. Three patterns of temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) have been defined, but one pattern where ...
Aim of the study was to identify the conditions under which spatial-environmental models can be used for the improved understanding of species distributions, under the explicit criterion of model predictive pe...
Sponges (Porifera) are nerve- and muscleless metazoa, but display coordinated motor reactions. Therefore, they represent a valuable phylum to investigate coordination systems, which evolved in a hypothetical U...
For marine snails, olfaction represents a crucial sensory modality for long-distance reception, as auditory and visual information is limited. The posterior tentacle of Aplysia, the rhinophore, is a chemosensory ...
We used behavioural and genetic data to investigate the effects of density on male reproductive success in the zebrafish, Danio rerio. Based on previous measurements of aggression and courtship behaviour by terri...
Genetic and environmental variation are both known to influence development. Evolution of a developmental response that is optimized to the environment (adaptive plasticity) requires the existence of genetic v...
There has been considerable research on rodent ultrasound in the laboratory and these sounds have been well quantified and characterized. Despite the value of research on ultrasound produced by mice in the lab...
In some arthropods there is a discrepancy in the number of dorsal tergites compared to the number of ventral sternites and leg pairs. The posterior tergites of the Diplopoda (millipedes) each cover two sternit...
The haplodiploid sex determining mechanism in Hymenoptera (males are haploid, females are diploid) has played an important role in the evolution of this insect order. In Hymenoptera sex is usually determined b...
Genetic studies have typically inferred the effects of human impact by documenting patterns of genetic differentiation and levels of genetic diversity among potentially isolated populations using selective neu...
One of the surprising insights gained from research in evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) is that increasing diversity in body plans and morphology in organisms across animal phyla are not reflected...
A variety of techniques are used to study the colours of animal signals, including the use of visual matching to colour charts. This paper aims to highlight why they are generally an unsatisfactory tool for th...
Ants use the odour of the colony to discriminate nestmates. In some species, this odour is learned during the first days following emergence, and thus early experience has a strong influence on nestmate discri...
Most arthropods pass through several molting stages (instars) before reaching sexual maturity. In spiders, very little is known about the male genital system, its development and seminal secretions. For exampl...
Hybridization receives attention because of the potential role that it may play in generating evolutionary novelty. An explanation for the emergence of novel phenotypes is given by transgressive segregation, w...
Identifying the individuals within a population can generate information on life history parameters, generate input data for conservation models, and highlight behavioural traits that may affect management dec...
Maritime Antarctic freshwater habitats are amongst the fastest changing environments on Earth. Temperatures have risen around 1°C and ice cover has dramatically decreased in 15 years. Few animal species inhabi...
The outcome of parasite exposure depends on the (1) genetic specificity of the interaction, (2) induction of host defenses, and (3) parasite counter defenses. We studied both the genetic specificity for infect...
Social subjugation is a very significant and natural stressor in the animal kingdom. Adult animals defeated and subjugated during establishment of dominance hierarchies or territorial encounters can be highly ...
Identifying species of organisms by short sequences of DNA has been in the center of ongoing discussions under the terms DNA barcoding or DNA taxonomy. A C-terminal fragment of the mitochondrial gene for cytochro...
Coevolution between pairs of antagonistic species is generally considered an endless "arms race" between attack and defense traits to counteract the adaptive responses of the other species.
In general shell-less slugs are considered to be slimy animals with a rather dull appearance and a pest to garden plants. But marine slugs usually are beautifully coloured animals belonging to the less-known O...
Competition with filamentous fungi has been demonstrated to be an important cause of mortality for the vast group of insects that depend on ephemeral resources (e.g. fruit, dung, carrion). Recent data suggest ...
Temperature-adaptive physiological variation plays important roles in latitudinal biogeographic patterning and in setting vertical distributions along subtidal-to-intertidal gradients in coastal marine ecosyst...
The Drosophila genes wingless (wg) and decapentaplegic (dpp) comprise the top level of a hierarchical gene cascade involved in proximal-distal (PD) patterning of the legs. It remains unclear, whether this cascade...
Traditionally the rapid origin of megadiverse species flocks of extremely closely related species is explained by the combinatory action of three factors: Disruptive natural selection, disruptive sexual select...
DNA techniques, analytical methods and palaeoclimatic studies are greatly advancing our knowledge of the global distribution of genetic diversity, and how it evolved. Such phylogeographic studies are reviewed ...
In the spider Cupiennius salei about 30 groups of neural precursors are generated per hemi-segment during early neurogenesis. Analysis of the ventral neuromeres after invagination of the primary neural precursor ...
The colour of animals' skin, fur, feathers or cuticula has been estimated in a large number of studies. The methods used to do so are diverse, with some being costly and not available to all researchers. In a ...
As a biological discipline, zoology has one of the longest histories. Today it occasionally appears as though, due to the rapid expansion of life sciences, zoology has been replaced by more or less independent...
Frontiers in Zoology