When facing a novel situation, animals can retreat or leave to avoid risks, but will miss potential resources and opportunities. Alternatively they may reduce environmental uncertainty by exploration, while ri...
Moult is one of the most costly activities in the annual cycle of birds and most avian species separate moult from other energy-demanding activities, such as migration. To this end, young birds tend to undergo...
Authors: Patrycja Podlaszczuk, Maciej Kamiński, Radosław Włodarczyk, Krzysztof Kaczmarek, Tomasz Janiszewski and Piotr Minias
Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) present an unparalleled insect model to integrate evolutionary genomics with ecology for the study of insect evolution. Key features of Odonata include their ancient phylo...
Authors: Seth Bybee, Alex Córdoba-Aguilar, M. Catherine Duryea, Ryo Futahashi, Bengt Hansson, M. Olalla Lorenzo-Carballa, Ruud Schilder, Robby Stoks, Anton Suvorov, Erik I. Svensson, Janne Swaegers, Yuma Takahashi, Phillip C. Watts and Maren Wellenreuther
Thaliaceans is one of the understudied classes of the phylum Tunicata. In particular, their phylogenetic relationships remain an issue of debate. The overall pattern of serotonin (5-HT) distribution is an exce...
Authors: Alberto Valero-Gracia, Rita Marino, Fabio Crocetta, Valeria Nittoli, Stefano Tiozzo and Paolo Sordino
Cephalopods are a highly derived class of molluscs that adapted their body plan to a more active and predatory lifestyle. One intriguing adaptation is the modification of the ventral foot to form a bilaterally...
Authors: Marie-Therese Nödl, Alexandra Kerbl, Manfred G. Walzl, Gerd B. Müller and Heinz Gert de Couet
Orangutans have one of the slowest-paced life histories of all mammals. Whereas life-history theory suggests that the time to reach adulthood is constrained by the time needed to reach adult body size, the nee...
Authors: Caroline Schuppli, Sofia I. F. Forss, Ellen J. M. Meulman, Nicole Zweifel, Kevin C. Lee, Evasari Rukmana, Erin R. Vogel, Maria A. van Noordwijk and Carel P. van Schaik
Most biological functions are synchronized to the environmental light:dark cycle via a circadian timekeeping system. Bears exhibit shallow torpor combined with metabolic suppression during winter dormancy. We ...
Authors: Heiko T. Jansen, Tanya Leise, Gordon Stenhouse, Karine Pigeon, Wayne Kasworm, Justin Teisberg, Thomas Radandt, Robert Dallmann, Steven Brown and Charles T. Robbins
Photoreceptors have evolved numerous times giving organisms the ability to detect light and respond to specific visual stimuli. Studies into the visual abilities of the Asteroidea (Echinodermata) have recently...
Authors: Ronald Petie, Anders Garm and Michael R. Hall
Understanding the role of avian vocal communication in social organisation requires knowledge of the vocal repertoire used to convey information. Parrots use acoustic signals in a variety of social contexts, b...
Authors: Adolfo Christian Montes-Medina, Alejandro Salinas-Melgoza and Katherine Renton
The minute, finely-tuned ear ossicles of mammals arose through a spectacular evolutionary transformation from their origins as a load-bearing jaw joint. This involved detachment from the postdentary trough of ...
Authors: Héctor E. Ramírez-Chaves, Vera Weisbecker, Stephen Wroe and Matthew J. Phillips
The amount of resources provided by the mother before birth has important and long-lasting effects on offspring fitness. Despite this, there is a large amount of variation in maternal investment seen in natura...
Authors: Joel L. Pick, Pascale Hutter, Christina Ebneter, Ann-Kathrin Ziegler, Marta Giordano and Barbara Tschirren
Information on larval diet of many holometabolous insects remains incomplete. Carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) stable isotope analysis in adult wing tissue can provide an efficient tool to infer such trophic relati...
Authors: Marc-Oliver Adams, Carlo Lutz Seifert, Lisamarie Lehner, Christine Truxa, Wolfgang Wanek and Konrad Fiedler
Ultrastructures in butterfly wing scales can take many shapes, resulting in the often striking coloration of many butterflies due to interference of light. The plethora of coloration mechanisms is dazzling, bu...
Authors: Bodo D. Wilts, Marco A. Giraldo and Doekele G. Stavenga
Determination of the embryonic body axes is a crucial developmental process in all animals. The establishment of the embryonic axes of spiders has been best studied in the common-house-spider Parasteatoda tepidar...
Assessing the range and territories of wild mammals traditionally requires years of data collection and often involves directly following individuals or using tracking devices. Indirect and non-invasive method...
Authors: Ammie K. Kalan, Alex K. Piel, Roger Mundry, Roman M. Wittig, Christophe Boesch and Hjalmar S. Kühl
Dewlaps are iconic features of several ungulate species and, although a role in signalling has been postulated, their function remains largely unexplored. We recently failed to find any age-independent link be...
In most mammals, lactating mothers dramatically increase their food intake after parturition and reach a peak intake rate after a certain time while their offspring continue to grow. A common view, perpetuated...
Authors: Frédéric Douhard, Jean-François Lemaître, Wendy M. Rauw and Nicolas C. Friggens
As increasingly fragmented and isolated populations of threatened species become subjected to climate change, invasive species and other stressors, there is an urgent need to consider adaptive potential when m...
Authors: Andrew R. Weeks, Jakub Stoklosa and Ary A. Hoffmann
Morphological characters of birds reflect their adaptive evolution and ecological requirements and are also relevant to phylogenetic relationships within a group of related species. The tits (Paridae) are know...
Authors: Shimiao Shao, Qing Quan, Tianlong Cai, Gang Song, Yanhua Qu and Fumin Lei
The flight patterns of albatrosses and shearwaters have become a touchstone for much of Lévy flight research, spawning an extensive field of enquiry. There is now compelling evidence that the flight patterns o...
Authors: Andrew M. Reynolds, Vitor H. Paiva, Jacopo G. Cecere and Stefano Focardi
Bitter taste perception is essential for species with selective food intake, enabling them to avoid unpalatable or toxic items. Previous studies noted a marked variation in the number of TAS2R genes among various...
Authors: Zhijin Liu, Guangjian Liu, Frank Hailer, Pablo Orozco-terWengel, Xinxin Tan, Jundong Tian, Zhongze Yan, Baowei Zhang and Ming Li
The swimming activity of sea urchin larvae is dependent on the ciliary band (CB) on the larval surface and is regulated by several neurotransmitters, including serotonin (5HT), dopamine, and γ-aminobutyric aci...
Innovative new techniques that aid in the visualization of microscopic anatomical structures have improved our understanding of organismal biology significantly. It is often challenging to observe internal 3D ...
Authors: Yongying Ruan, Dan Dan, Mengna Zhang, Ming Bai, Ming Lei, Baoli Yao and Xingke Yang
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
