Birds have highly mobile necks, but neither the details of how they realize complex poses nor the evolution of this complex musculoskeletal system is well-understood. Most previous work on avian neck function ...
Authors: Robert E. Kambic, Andrew A. Biewener and Stephanie E. Pierce
Trophic interactions are a fundamental aspect of ecosystem functioning, but often difficult to observe directly. Several indirect techniques, such as fatty acid analysis, were developed to assess these interac...
Authors: Félix B. Rosumek, Adrian Brückner, Nico Blüthgen, Florian Menzel and Michael Heethoff
Animal colours and patterns commonly play a role in reducing detection by predators, social signalling or increasing survival in response to some other environmental pressure. Different colour morphs can evolv...
Authors: Aidan O’Hanlon, Kristina Feeney, Peter Dockery and Michael J. Gormally
Acclimation to abiotic challenges, including decreases in O2 availability, requires physiological and anatomical phenotyping to accommodate the organism to the environmental conditions. The retention of a nucleus...
Authors: Juan Antonio Martos-Sitcha, Azucena Bermejo-Nogales, Josep Alvar Calduch-Giner and Jaume Pérez-Sánchez
Foraging efficiency determines whether animals will be able to raise healthy broods, maintain their own condition, avoid predators and ultimately increase their fitness. Using accelerometers and GPS loggers, f...
Authors: Juan F. Masello, Akiko Kato, Julia Sommerfeld, Thomas Mattern and Petra Quillfeldt
Numerous historical descriptions of the Lesser Egyptian jerboa, Jaculus jaculus, a small bipedal mammal with elongate hindlimbs, make special note of their extraordinary leaping ability. We observed jerboa locomo...
Authors: Talia Y. Moore, Alberto M. Rivera and Andrew A. Biewener
The origin of jawed vertebrates was marked by profound reconfigurations of the skeleton and muscles of the head and by the acquisition of two sets of paired appendages. Extant cartilaginous fish retained numer...
Authors: Janine M. Ziermann, Renata Freitas and Rui Diogo
A substantial period of life after reproduction ends, known as postreproductive lifespan (PRLS), is at odds with classical life history theory and its causes and mechanisms have puzzled evolutionary biologists...
Authors: Theoni Photopoulou, Ines M. Ferreira, Peter B. Best, Toshio Kasuya and Helene Marsh
Fat deposits enable a female mammal to bear the energy costs of offspring production and thus greatly influence her reproductive success. However, increasing locomotor costs and reduced agility counterbalance ...
Authors: Sandra A. Heldstab, Carel P. van Schaik and Karin Isler
Variation in growth and immune function within and among populations is often associated with specific environmental conditions. We compared growth and immune function in nestlings of year-round breeding equat...
Authors: Henry K. Ndithia, Samuel N. Bakari, Kevin D. Matson, Muchane Muchai and B. Irene Tieleman
The structure and development of the nervous system in Lophotrochozoa has long been recognized as one of the most important subjects for phylogenetic and evolutionary discussion. Many recent papers have presen...
Authors: Viktor V. Starunov, Elena E. Voronezhskaya and Leonid P. Nezlin
Stem cells are undifferentiated cells with a potential for self-renewal, which are essential to support normal development and homeostasis. To gain insight into the molecular mechanisms underlying adult stem c...
Authors: Matthias Teuscher, Nadi Ströhlein, Markus Birkenbach, Dorothea Schultheis and Michael Schoppmeier
The understanding of concerted movements and its underlying biomechanics is often complex and elusive. Functional principles and hypothetical functions of these complex movements can provide a solid basis for ...
Authors: Sebastian Büsse, Thomas Hörnschemeyer and Stanislav N. Gorb
Reproductive division of labor is one of the key features of social insects. Queens are adapted for reproduction while workers are adapted for foraging and colony maintenance. In many species, however, workers...
Authors: Ching-Chen Lee, Hirotaka Nakao, Shu-Ping Tseng, Hung-Wei Hsu, Gwo-Li Lin, Jia-Wei Tay, Johan Billen, Fuminori Ito, Chow-Yang Lee, Chung-Chi Lin and Chin-Cheng (Scotty) Yang
Numerous species, especially among rodents, are strongly affected by the availability of pulsed resources. The intermittent production of large seed crops in northern hemisphere tree species (e.g., beech Fagus sp...
Authors: Jessica S. Cornils, Franz Hoelzl, Birgit Rotter, Claudia Bieber and Thomas Ruf
The hypopharyngeal gland of worker bees contributes to the production of the royal jelly fed to queens and larvae. The gland consists of thousands of two-cell units that are composed of a secretory cell and a ...
Authors: Sascha Peter Klose, Daniel Rolke and Otto Baumann
Ocean acidification and warming are happening fast in the Arctic but little is known about the effects of ocean acidification and warming on the physiological performance and survival of Arctic fish.
Authors: Elettra Leo, Kristina L. Kunz, Matthias Schmidt, Daniela Storch, Hans-O. Pörtner and Felix C. Mark
The Asian house rat (Rattus tanezumi) and the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) are closely related species and are partially sympatric in southern China. Over the past 20 years, R. tanezumi has significantly expande...
Animals show consistent individual behavioural differences in many species. Further, behavioural traits (personality traits) form behavioural syndromes, characterised by correlations between different behaviou...
Authors: Andrea C. Schuster, Uwe Zimmermann, Carina Hauer and Katharina Foerster
Glass sponges (Class Hexactinellida) are important components of deep-sea ecosystems and are of interest from geological and materials science perspectives. The reconstruction of their phylogeny with molecular...
Authors: Martin Dohrmann, Christopher Kelley, Michelle Kelly, Andrzej Pisera, John N. A. Hooper and Henry M. Reiswig
Predicting the consequences of continuing anthropogenic changes in the environment for migratory behaviours such as phenology remains a major challenge. Predictions remain particularly difficult, because our k...
Authors: Heiko Schmaljohann, Simeon Lisovski and Franz Bairlein
In highly structured societies, individuals behave flexibly and cooperatively in order to achieve a particular group-level outcome. However, even in social species, environmental inputs can have long lasting e...
Dark pigments provide animals with several adaptive benefits such as protection against ultraviolet (UV) radiation and mechanical abrasion, but may also impose several constraints like a high absorbance of sol...
Authors: Ismael Galván, Daniel Palacios and Juan José Negro
Most animal eyes feature an opaque pigmented eyecup to assure that light can enter from one direction only. We challenge this dogma by describing a previously unknown form of eyeshine resulting from light that...
Authors: Roland Fritsch, Jeremy F. P. Ullmann, Pierre-Paul Bitton, Shaun P. Collin and Nico K. Michiels
Regeneration of the damaged central nervous system is one of the most interesting post-embryonic developmental phenomena. Two distinct cellular events have been implicated in supplying regenerative neurogenesi...
Authors: Vladimir S. Mashanov, Olga R. Zueva and José E. García-Arrarás
