Through the actions of one or more isoforms of the enzyme 5α-reductase in many male reproductive tissues, circulating testosterone (T) undergoes metabolic conversion into 5α-dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which bi...
Authors: Matthew J. Fuxjager, Eric R. Schuppe, John Hoang, Jennifer Chew, Mital Shah and Barney A. Schlinger
Species-specific strategies for financing the costs of reproduction are well understood, forming a continuum ranging from high to low reliance on stored nutrients. Animals relying mostly on stored reserves are...
Authors: Kim Jaatinen, Markus Öst and Keith A. Hobson
An external skeleton is an essential part of the body plan of many animals and is thought to be one of the key factors that enabled the great expansion in animal diversity and disparity during the Cambrian exp...
Authors: Kevin M. Kocot, Felipe Aguilera, Carmel McDougall, Daniel J. Jackson and Bernard M. Degnan
The expression of animal personality is indicated by patterns of consistency in individual behaviour. Often, the differences exhibited between individuals are consistent across situations. However, between som...
Authors: Kyriacos Kareklas, Gareth Arnott, Robert W. Elwood and Richard A. Holland
Male-male competition and female mating preference are major mechanisms of sexual selection, which influences individual fitness. How male-male competition affects female preference, however, remains poorly un...
Authors: Saori Yokoi, Satoshi Ansai, Masato Kinoshita, Kiyoshi Naruse, Yasuhiro Kamei, Larry J. Young, Teruhiro Okuyama and Hideaki Takeuchi
The high incidence of hybridization in waterfowl (ducks, geese and swans) makes this bird group an excellent study system to answer questions related to the evolution and maintenance of species boundaries. How...
Authors: Jente Ottenburghs, Pim van Hooft, Sipke E. van Wieren, Ronald C. Ydenberg and Herbert H. T. Prins
Glucocorticoids are adrenal steroid hormones essential to homeostatic maintenance. Their daily variation at low concentrations regulates physiology and behavior to sustain proper immunological and metabolic fu...
Authors: Philipp Schwabl, Elisa Bonaccorso and Wolfgang Goymann
Brittle stars regenerate their whole arms post-amputation. Amphiura filiformis can now be used for molecular characterization of arm regeneration due to the availability of transcriptomic data. Previous work show...
Authors: Anna Czarkwiani, Cinzia Ferrario, David Viktor Dylus, Michela Sugni and Paola Oliveri
Rapid habitat loss and degradation are responsible for population decline in a growing number of species. Understanding the natural history of these species is important for designing conservation strategies, ...
Authors: Amrita Srivathsan, Andie Ang, Alfried P. Vogler and Rudolf Meier
Traditional theory assumes that egg recognition and rejection abilities arise as a response against interspecific brood parasitism (IBP). However, rejection also appears in some species that are currently not ...
Authors: Francisco Ruiz-Raya, Manuel Soler, Gianluca Roncalli, Teresa Abaurrea and Juan Diego Ibáñez-Álamo
The Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann) (Diptera: Tephritidae) is a highly invasive species now with an almost cosmopolitan distribution. Two other damaging, polyphagous and closely-related sp...
Authors: Christopher W. Weldon, Leigh Boardman, Danica Marlin and John S. Terblanche
The study of morphology is experiencing a renaissance due to rapid improvements in technologies for 3D visualization of complex internal and external structures. But 3D visualization of the internal structure ...
Authors: Tomonari Kaji, Keiichi Kakui, Naoyuki Miyazaki, Kazuyoshi Murata and A. Richard Palmer
Wrasses represent the second largest family of marine fishes and display a high diversity of complex colours linked to ecological functions. Recently, red autofluorescent body colouration has been reported in ...
Authors: Tobias Gerlach, Jennifer Theobald, Nathan S. Hart, Shaun P. Collin and Nico K. Michiels
White-nose syndrome (WNS) has devastated bat populations in North America, with millions of bats dead. WNS is associated with physiological changes in hibernating bats, leading to increased arousals from hiber...
Authors: Thomas Mikael Lilley, Joseph Samuel Johnson, Lasse Ruokolainen, Elisabeth Jeannine Rogers, Cali Ann Wilson, Spencer Mead Schell, Kenneth Alan Field and DeeAnn Marie Reeder
Terrestrial animals regularly move up and down surfaces in their natural habitat, and the impacts of moving uphill on locomotion are commonly examined. However, if an animal goes up, it must go down. Many morp...
Authors: Aleksandra V. Birn-Jeffery and Timothy E. Higham
Titi monkeys, Callicebus, comprise the most species-rich primate genus—34 species are currently recognised, five of them described since 2005. The lack of molecular data for titi monkeys has meant that little is ...
Authors: Hazel Byrne, Anthony B. Rylands, Jeferson C. Carneiro, Jessica W. Lynch Alfaro, Fabricio Bertuol, Maria N. F. da Silva, Mariluce Messias, Colin P. Groves, Russell A. Mittermeier, Izeni Farias, Tomas Hrbek, Horacio Schneider, Iracilda Sampaio and Jean P. Boubli
Do evolutionary specializations lead to evolutionary constraint? This appears plausible, particularly when specialization leads to loss of complex adaptations. In the owl monkey lineage, nocturnality clearly a...
Authors: N. I. Mundy, N. C. Morningstar, A. L. Baden, E. Fernandez-Duque, V. M. Dávalos and B. J. Bradley
The functional design of skeletal muscles is shaped by conflicting selective pressures between support and propulsion, which becomes even more important as animals get larger. If larger animals were geometrica...
Authors: Taylor J. M. Dick and Christofer J. Clemente
Hibernation has been a key area of research for several decades, essentially in small mammals in the laboratory, yet we know very little about what triggers or ends it in the wild. Do climatic factors, an inte...
Authors: A. L. Evans, N. J. Singh, A. Friebe, J. M. Arnemo, T. G. Laske, O. Fröbert, J. E. Swenson and S. Blanc
Environmental variation associated with season length is likely to promote differentiation in life-history traits, but has been little studied in natural populations of ectotherms. We investigated patterns of ...
Authors: Wen Bo Liao, Yi Luo, Shang Ling Lou, Di Lu and Robert Jehle
Oweniids are marine tubeworms burrowing in muddy sediments that in current phylogenies form an early branching lineage within Annelida. Little is known about their general morphology, in particular the nervous...
Authors: Nadezhda N. Rimskaya-Korsakova, Alen Kristof, Vladimir V. Malakhov and Andreas Wanninger
Reactive oxygen (ROS) and nitrogen (RNS) species are produced during normal unstressed metabolic activity in aerobic tissues. Most analytical work uses tissue homogenates, and lacks spatial information on the ...
Authors: Georgina A. Rivera-Ingraham, Iara Rocchetta, Ulf Bickmeyer, Stefanie Meyer and Doris Abele
Nest sanitation is a widespread but rarely studied behavior in birds. The most common form of nest sanitation behavior, the removal of nestling feces, has focused the discussion about which selective pressures...
Authors: Juan Diego Ibáñez-Álamo, Francisco Ruiz-Raya, Laura Rodríguez and Manuel Soler
Ascidians can associate with abundant and diverse consortia of microbial symbionts, yet these communities remain unexamined for the majority of host ascidians and little is known about host-symbiont interactions.
Authors: Susanna López-Legentil, Xavier Turon and Patrick M. Erwin
Environmental stressors increase the secretion of glucocorticoids that in turn can shorten telomeres via oxidative damage. Modification of telomere length, as a result of adversity faced early in life, can mod...
Authors: Verónica Quirici, Claudia Jimena Guerrero, Jesse S. Krause, John C. Wingfield and Rodrigo A. Vásquez
Studying species with disjunct distributions allows biogeographers to evaluate factors controlling species ranges, limits on gene flow, and allopatric speciation. Here, we use phylogeographic and population ge...
Authors: Sergio Marchant, Amy L. Moran and Peter B. Marko
Plasticity in brain size and the size of different brain regions during early ontogeny is known from many vertebrate taxa, but less is known about plasticity in the brains of adults. In contrast to mammals and...
Authors: Gábor Herczeg, Abigél Gonda, Gergely Balázs, Kristina Noreikiene and Juha Merilä
Body size variation has played a central role in biogeographical research, however, most studies have aimed to describe trends rather than search for underlying mechanisms. In order to provide a more comprehen...
Authors: Andrés Valenzuela-Sánchez, Andrew A. Cunningham and Claudio Soto-Azat
How host manipulation by parasites evolves is fascinating but challenging evolutionary question remains. Many parasites share the capacity to manipulate host behavior increasing their transmission success. How...
The tapeworm Ligula intestinalis (Diphyllobothriidea) is one of the most fascinating cestode parasites because it may cause parasitic castration of its second intermediate host, teleost freshwater fishes, due to ...
Authors: Aneta Yoneva, Tomáš Scholz, Daniel Młocicki and Roman Kuchta
Myogenesis is currently investigated in a number of invertebrate taxa using combined techniques, including fluorescence labeling, confocal microscopy, and 3D imaging, in order to understand anatomical and func...
Authors: Jorge A. Audino, José Eduardo A. R. Marian, Alen Kristof and Andreas Wanninger
Here we present an application of advanced registration and atlas building framework DRAMMS to the automated annotation of mouse mandibles through a series of tests using single and multi-atlas segmentation pa...
Chemical cues and pheromones guide decisions in organisms throughout the animal kingdom. The neurobiology, function, and evolution of olfaction are particularly well described in insects, and resulting concept...
Authors: Tyler J. Buchinger, Michael J. Siefkes, Barbara S. Zielinski, Cory O. Brant and Weiming Li
Intraspecific communication is of crucial importance throughout the animal kingdom and may involve a combination of visual, gustatory, olfactory and acoustic cues. Variation in male sex pheromone amount and co...
Authors: Tobias Kehl, Ian A.N. Dublon and Klaus Fischer
The astonishing spectrum of scarabaeine lifestyles makes them an attractive group for studies in entomology and evolutionary biology. As a result of adaptions to specific food substrates and textures, the mout...
Authors: Ming Bai, Sha Li, Yuanyuan Lu, Haidong Yang, Yijie Tong and Xingke Yang
Stick insects (Phasmatodea) use repellent chemical substances (allomones) for defence which are released from so-called defence glands in the prothorax. These glands differ in size between species, and are und...
Authors: Konrad Stolz, Christoph-Rüdiger von Bredow, Yvette M. von Bredow, Reinhard Lakes-Harlan, Tina E. Trenczek and Johannes Strauß
Though some elements of the bryozoan nervous system were discovered 180 years ago, few studies of their neuromorphology have been undertaken since that time. As a result the general picture of the bryozoan ner...
Authors: Ksenia V. Shunkina, Olga V. Zaytseva, Viktor V. Starunov and Andrew N. Ostrovsky
Amphibians secrete a wide diversity of chemicals from skin glands as defense against predators, parasites, and pathogens. Most defensive chemicals are produced endogenously through biosynthesis, but poison fro...
Authors: Adriana M. Jeckel, Ralph A. Saporito and Taran Grant
Mate-choice copying is a form of social learning in which an individual gains information about potential mates by observing conspecifics. However, it is still unknown what kind of information drives the decis...
Authors: Nina Kniel, Jennifer Schmitz and Klaudia Witte
Immunosenescence (deteriorating immune function at old age) affects humans and laboratory animals, but little is known about immunosenescence in natural populations despite its potential importance for populat...
Authors: Anni Hämäläinen, Brigitte Raharivololona, Pascaline Ravoniarimbinina and Cornelia Kraus
Invertebrate-derived DNA (iDNA) from terrestrial haematophagous leeches has recently been proposed as a powerful non-invasive tool with which to detect vertebrate species and thus to survey their populations. ...
Authors: Ida Bærholm Schnell, Rahel Sollmann, Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer, Mark E. Siddall, Douglas W. Yu, Andreas Wilting and M. Thomas. P. Gilbert
The earliest tetrapods had hands and feet with up to eight digits but this number was subsequently reduced during evolution. It was assumed that lineages with more than five digits no longer exist but investig...
Monitoring large carnivores is a central issue in conservation biology. The wolf (Canis lupus) is the most studied large carnivore in the world. After a massive decline and several local extinctions, mostly due t...
Authors: Daniela Passilongo, Luca Mattioli, Elena Bassi, László Szabó and Marco Apollonio
Adult birds clean the nest by consuming or transporting feces, which is thought to be important in order to lower the levels of parasites, pathogens and predation at the nest. If nestlings were to defecate whe...
Authors: Rui-chang Quan, Huan Li, Bo Wang and Eben Goodale
It has been suggested that rapid range expansion could proceed through evolution in the endocrinological machinery controlling life-history switches. Based on this we tested whether the Colorado potato beetle, Le...
Authors: Philipp Lehmann, Anne Lyytinen, Saija Piiroinen and Leena Lindström
The development of ethologically meaningful test paradigms in young animals is an essential step in the study of the ontogeny of animal personality. Here we explore the possibility to integrate offspring separ...
Authors: Robyn Hudson, Marylin Rangassamy, Amor Saldaña, Oxána Bánszegi and Heiko G Rödel
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2015
12(Suppl 1):S12
An individual's fitness in part depends on the characteristics of the mate so that sexually attractive ornaments, as signals of quality, are used in mate choice. Often such ornaments develop already early in l...
Authors: E Tobias Krause and Marc Naguib
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2015
12(Suppl 1):S11
Variation in early nutrition is known to play an important role in shaping the behavioural development of individuals. Parental prey selection may have long-lasting behavioural influences. In birds foraging on...
Authors: Kees van Oers, Gregory M Kohn, Camilla A Hinde and Marc Naguib
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2015
12(Suppl 1):S10
A crucial assumption of animal personality research is that behaviour is consistent over time, showing a high repeatability within individuals. This assumption is often made, sometimes tested using short time ...
