Animal toxins can have medical and therapeutic applications. Principally, toxins produced by insects, arachnids, snakes and frogs have been characterized. Venomous mammals are rare, and their venoms have not b...
Authors: Krzysztof Kowalski, Paweł Marciniak, Grzegorz Rosiński and Leszek Rychlik
Reproduction is an energetically expensive process that supposedly impairs somatic integrity in the long term, because resources are limited and have to be allocated between reproduction and somatic maintenanc...
Authors: Charlotte Katharina Maria Schielke, Hynek Burda, Yoshiyuki Henning, Jan Okrouhlík and Sabine Begall
A central question in evolutionary parasitology is to what extent ecology impacts patterns of parasitism in wild host populations. In this study, we aim to disentangle factors influencing the risk of parasite ...
Authors: May Hokan, Christina Strube, Ute Radespiel and Elke Zimmermann
Over the past couple of decades, measuring immunological parameters has become widespread in studies of ecology and evolution. A combination of different immunological indices is useful for quantifying differe...
Authors: Arne Hegemann, Sara Pardal and Kevin D. Matson
Fluorochrome staining is among the most widely used techniques to study growth dynamics of echinoderms. However, it fails to detect fine-scale increments because produced marks are commonly diffusely distribut...
Authors: Przemysław Gorzelak, Aurélie Dery, Philippe Dubois and Jarosław Stolarski
Diversity of hair in marine mammals was suggested as an evolutionary innovation to adapt aquatic environment, yet its genetic basis remained poorly explored. We scanned α-keratin genes, one major structural co...
Authors: Xiaohui Sun, Zepeng Zhang, Yingying Sun, Jing Li, Shixia Xu and Guang Yang
In many regions, freshwater wetlands are increasing in salinity at rates exceeding historic levels. Some freshwater organisms, like amphibians, may be able to adapt and persist in salt-contaminated wetlands by...
Aedes albopictus (Diptera; Culicidae) is a highly invasive mosquito species and a competent vector of several arboviral diseases that have spread rapidly throughout the world. Prevalen...
Authors: Giacomo Tavecchia, Miguel-Angel Miranda, David Borrás, Mikel Bengoa, Carlos Barceló, Claudia Paredes-Esquivel and Carl Schwarz
In many animal species, interactions between individuals of different sex often occur in the context of courtship and mating. During these interactions, a specific mating partner can be chosen. By discriminati...
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
Pair compatibility affects the success of a pair; however, its causes and mechanisms are not fully understood. Vocal exchange may be very important for pair formation, coordinating pair activities, maintaining...
Authors: Pietro Bruno D’Amelio, Lisa Trost and Andries ter Maat
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
The Yangzhou goose is a long-day breeding bird that has been increasingly produced in China. Artificial lighting programs are used for controlling its reproductive activities. This study investigated the regul...
Authors: Huanxi Zhu, Zhe Chen, Xibin Shao, Jianning Yu, Chuankun Wei, Zichun Dai and Zhendan Shi
Predation risk is a primary motivator for prey to congregate in larger groups. A large group can be beneficial to detect predators, share predation risk among individuals and cause confusion for an attacking p...
Authors: Johan Månsson, Marie-Caroline Prima, Kerry L. Nicholson, Camilla Wikenros and Håkan Sand
Sexual selection has been hypothesised as favouring mate choice resulting in production of viable offspring with genotypes providing high pathogen resistance. Specific pathogen recognition is mediated by genes...
Authors: Dana Rymešová, Tereza Králová, Marta Promerová, Josef Bryja, Oldřich Tomášek, Jana Svobodová, Petr Šmilauer, Miroslav Šálek and Tomáš Albrecht
Non-human animals often produce different types of vocalisations in negative and positive contexts (i.e. different valence), similar to humans, in which crying is associated with negative emotions and laughter...
Authors: Elodie F. Briefer, Roi Mandel, Anne-Laure Maigrot, Sabrina Briefer Freymond, Iris Bachmann and Edna Hillmann
The pilidium larva is an idiosyncrasy defining one clade of marine invertebrates, the Pilidiophora (Nemertea, Spiralia). Uniquely, in pilidial development, the juvenile worm forms from a series of isolated rud...
Arthropod diversity is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. The study of ontogeny is pivotal to understand which developmental processes underlie the incredible morphological disparity of arthropods and thus to...
Authors: Georg Brenneis, Ekaterina V. Bogomolova, Claudia P. Arango and Franz Krapp
Individual differences in behaviour are widespread in the animal kingdom and often influenced by the size or composition of the social group during early development. In many vertebrates the effects of social ...
Authors: Stefanie Bölting and Nikolaus von Engelhardt
Solar-powered sea slugs are famed for their ability to survive starvation due to incorporated algal chloroplasts. It is well established that algal-derived carbon can be traced in numerous slug-derived compoun...
Authors: Elise M. J. Laetz, Victoria C. Moris, Leif Moritz, André N. Haubrich and Heike Wägele
Various types of long-term stable relationships that individuals uphold, including cooperation and competition between group members, define social complexity in vertebrates. Numerous life history, physiologic...
Authors: Isabella B. R. Scheiber, Brigitte M. Weiß, Sjouke A. Kingma and Jan Komdeur
The social environment the mother experiences during pregnancy and lactation can powerfully influence the offspring’s behavioural profile. Our previous studies in wild cavies show that two different social env...
Authors: Katja Siegeler, Lars Lewejohann, Klaus Failing, Norbert Sachser and Sylvia Kaiser
Snakes are considered to be vomerolfaction specialists. They are members of one of the most diverse groups of vertebrates, Squamata. The vomeronasal organ and the associated structures (such as the lacrimal du...
Authors: Paweł Kaczmarek, Mateusz Hermyt and Weronika Rupik
Hybrid zones are regions where individuals of two species meet and produce hybrid progeny, and are often regarded as natural laboratories to understand the process of species formation. Two microevolutionary p...
Authors: Jan W. Arntzen, Tania Trujillo, Roland Butôt, Klaas Vrieling, Onno Schaap, Jorge Gutiérrez-Rodríguez and Iñigo Martínez-Solano
To better understand how different ambient temperatures during lactation affect survival of young, we studied patterns of losses of pups in golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) at different ambient temperatures...
Authors: Sarah A. Ohrnberger, Raquel Monclús, Heiko G. Rödel and Teresa G. Valencak
The visual systems in chelicerates are poorly understood, even though they show strong variation in eye and visual neuropil architecture, thus may provide valuable insights for the understanding of chelicerate...
Authors: Tobias Lehmann, Eva Lodde-Bensch, Roland R. Melzer and Martina Metz
Several independent meiofaunal lineages are suggested to have originated through progenesis, however, morphological support for this heterochronous process is still lacking. Progenesis is defined as an arrest ...
Authors: Alexandra Kerbl, Elizaveta G. Fofanova, Tatiana D. Mayorova, Elena E. Voronezhskaya and Katrine Worsaae
