Nymphs of many spittlebug species are known to aggregate in one spittle mass, a behavior which greatly benefits the survival of the developing nymphs. Little is known, however, about the precise mechanisms tha...
Elucidating the relationship between habitat characteristics and population parameters is critical for effective conservation. Habitat suitability index (HSI) models are often used in wildlife management and c...
Authors: Bianca Unglaub, Sebastian Steinfartz, Axel Drechsler and Benedikt R Schmidt
An important goal for understanding how animals have evolved is to reconstruct the ancestral features and evolution of the nervous system. Many inferences about nervous system evolution are weak because of spa...
Demospongiae is the largest sponge class including 81% of all living sponges with nearly 7,000 species worldwide. Systema Porifera (2002) was the result of a large international collaboration to update the Demosp...
The Antarctic Ocean hosts a rich and diverse fauna despite inhospitable temperatures close to freezing, which require specialist adaptations to sustain animal activity and various underlying body functions. Wh...
Authors: Michael Oellermann, Bernhard Lieb, Hans-O Pörtner, Jayson M Semmens and Felix C Mark
Species of the order Primates are highly gregarious with most species living in permanent heterosexual social groups. According to theory in socioecology maximum social group size is limited by rates of intra-...
Authors: Peng-Fei Fan, Thad Q Bartlett, Han-Lan Fei, Chang-Yong Ma and Wen Zhang
Individuals of the same age can differ substantially in the degree to which they have accumulated tissue damage, akin to bodily wear and tear, from past experiences. This accumulated tissue damage reflects the...
Authors: Michaela Hau, Mark F Haussmann, Timothy J Greives, Christa Matlack, David Costantini, Michael Quetting, James S Adelman, Ana Catarina Miranda and Jesko Partecke
Spiders are important arthropod predators in many terrestrial ecosystems, and molecular tools have boosted our ability to investigate this taxon, which can be difficult to study with conventional methods. None...
Authors: Daniela Sint, Isabella Thurner, Ruediger Kaufmann and Michael Traugott
In most species, acoustical cues are crucial for mother-offspring recognition. Studies of a few species of ungulates showed that potential for individual recognition may differ between nasal and oral contact c...
Authors: Olga V Sibiryakova, Ilya A Volodin, Vera A Matrosova, Elena V Volodina, Andrés J Garcia, Laureano Gallego and Tomás Landete-Castillejos
During larval settlement and metamorphosis, marine invertebrates undergo changes in habitat, morphology, behavior and physiology. This change between life-cycle stages is often associated with a change in diet...
Authors: Elizabeth A Williams, Markus Conzelmann and Gáspár Jékely
Exposure to elevated seawater PCO2 limits the thermal tolerance of crustaceans but the underlying mechanisms have not been comprehensively explored. Larval stages of crustaceans are even more sensitive to environ...
Authors: Melanie Schiffer, Lars Harms, Magnus Lucassen, Felix Christopher Mark, Hans-Otto Pörtner and Daniela Storch
Calanus finmarchicus, a highly abundant copepod that is an important primary consumer in North Atlantic ecosystems, has a flexible life history in which copepods in the last juvenile developmental stage (fifth co...
Authors: Ann M Tarrant, Mark F Baumgartner, Bjørn Henrik Hansen, Dag Altin, Trond Nordtug and Anders J Olsen
Individual recognition and winner/loser effects both play important roles in animal contests, but how their influences are integrated to affect an individual’s contest decisions in combination remains unclear....
Authors: Cheng-Yu Li, Yusan Yang, Pey-Yi Lee and Yuying Hsu
Comparatively few data are available concerning the structure of the adult nervous system in the Ectoprocta or Bryozoa. In contrast to all other ectoprocts, the cerebral ganglion of phylactolaemates contains a...
Authors: Anna V Weber, Andreas Wanninger and Thomas F Schwaha
The shipworm Lyrodus pedicellatus is a wood-boring bivalve with an unusual vermiform body. Although its larvae are brooded, they retain the general appearance of a typical bivalve veliger-type larva. Here, we des...
Authors: Andrea Wurzinger-Mayer, J Reuben Shipway, Alen Kristof, Thomas Schwaha, Simon M Cragg and Andreas Wanninger
Sexually selected traits contribute substantially to evolutionary diversification, for example by promoting assortative mating. The contributing traits and their relevance for reproductive isolation differ bet...
Authors: Kim G Mortega, Heiner Flinks and Barbara Helm
Chaetognatha are a phylum of marine carnivorous animals which includes more than 130 extant species. The internal systematics of this group have been intensively debated since it was discovered in the 18th centur...
Authors: Samah Gasmi, Gabriel Nve, Nicolas Pech, Sada Tekaya, Andr Gilles and Yvan Perez
Osmotic stress transcription factor 1 (Ostf1) was first discovered by subtractive hybridization in the gills of Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) transferred from fresh water (FW) to seawater (SW). It ...
Deep-sea alvinellid worm species endemic to hydrothermal vents, such as Alvinella and Paralvinella, are considered to be among the most thermotolerant animals known with their adaptability to toxic heavy metals, ...
Phylogenetic and population genetic studies often deal with multiple sequence alignments that require manipulation or processing steps such as sequence concatenation, sequence renaming, sequence translation or...
Urbanization can considerably impact animal ecology, evolution, and behavior. Among the new conditions that animals experience in cities is anthropogenic noise, which can limit the sound space available for an...
Authors: Mathieu Giraudeau, Paul M Nolan, Caitlin E Black, Stevan R Earl, Masaru Hasegawa and Kevin J McGraw
Food availability is an important environmental cue for animals for deciding how much to invest in reproduction, and it ultimately affects population size. The importance of food limitation has been extensivel...
Authors: Lise Ruffino, Pälvi Salo, Elina Koivisto, Peter B Banks and Erkki Korpimäki
Chemosensory signals play a vital role in socio-sexual interactions of rodents. Females rely heavily on chemosensory signals to evaluate genetic similarity and quality of potential mates, but their olfactory p...
Several alpine vertebrates share a distribution pattern that extends across the South-western Palearctic but is limited to the main mountain massifs. Although they are usually regarded as cold-adapted species,...
Authors: Antton Alberdi, Ostaizka Aizpurua, Joxerra Aihartza and Inazio Garin
Umami and sweet tastes are two important basic taste perceptions that allow animals to recognize diets with nutritious carbohydrates and proteins, respectively. Until recently, analyses of umami and sweet tast...
Authors: Guangjian Liu, Lutz Walter, Suni Tang, Xinxin Tan, Fanglei Shi, Huijuan Pan, Christian Roos, Zhijin Liu and Ming Li
The popular view on insect sociality is that of a harmonious division of labor among two morphologically distinct and functionally non-overlapping castes. But this is a highly derived state and not a prerequis...
Authors: Hans C Kelstrup, Klaus Hartfelder, Fabio S Nascimento and Lynn M Riddiford
The carbonic anhydrase (CA; EC 4.2.1.1) superfamily is a class of ubiquitous metallo-enzymes that catalyse the reversible hydration of carbon dioxide. The α-CA family, present in all metazoan clades, is a key ...
Authors: Nathalie Le Roy, Daniel J Jackson, Benjamin Marie, Paula Ramos-Silva and Frédéric Marin
Many species of ambystomatid salamanders are dependent upon highly variable temporary wetlands for larval development. High larval densities may prompt the expression of a distinct head morphology that may fac...
Authors: Dale M Jefferson, Maud CO Ferrari, Alicia Mathis, Keith A Hobson, Eric R Britzke, Adam L Crane, Andrew R Blaustein and Douglas P Chivers
Since its introduction from Taiwan to Europe around 1980, Anguillicola crassus, a natural parasite of the Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica), has acquired the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) as a novel definitive ...
Authors: Urszula Weclawski, Emanuel G Heitlinger, Tobias Baust, Bernhard Klar, Trevor Petney, Yu-San Han and Horst Taraschewski
The spectacular discovery of the new insect order Mantophasmatodea in 2002 was immediately followed by detailed studies on morphology and scattered information on different aspects of its behavior and general ...
Authors: Steffen Roth, Jorge Molina and Reinhard Predel
Limnognathia maerski is the single species of the recently described taxon, Micrognathozoa. The most conspicuous character of this animal is the complex set of jaws, which resembles an even more intricate version...
Authors: Nicolas Bekkouche, Reinhardt M Kristensen, Andreas Hejnol, Martin V Sørensen and Katrine Worsaae
Climate and environmental change have driven widespread changes in body size, particularly declines, across a range of taxonomic groups in recent decades. Size declines could substantially impact on the functi...
Authors: Tom HE Mason, Marco Apollonio, Roberta Chirichella, Stephen G Willis and Philip A Stephens
The calcareous shells of brachiopods offer a wealth of informative characters for taxonomic and phylogenetic investigations. In particular scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has been used for decades to visual...
Tardigrades are an ancient lineage of microinvertebrates with a unique metameric pattern consisting of a head and four lobopodal leg-bearing segments. While their close relationship to Onychophora and Arthropo...
Many prey species around the world are suffering declines due to a variety of interacting causes such as land use change, climate change, invasive species and novel disease. Recent studies on the ecological ro...
Authors: Benjamin L Allen, Lee R Allen, Richard M Engeman and Luke K-P Leung
Freshwater fishes of the genus Esox are found throughout the Holarctic region. The northern pike (E. lucius) has a circumpolar distribution whereas the assumed sister species the Amur pike (E. reichertii) is only...
Authors: Anna Skog, L Asbjørn Vøllestad, Nils Chr Stenseth, Alexander Kasumyan and Kjetill S Jakobsen
When birds fly in cluttered environments, they must tailor their flight to the gaps that they traverse. We trained budgerigars, Melopsittacus undulatus, to fly through a vertically oriented gap of variable width,...
Authors: Ingo Schiffner, Hong D Vo, Partha S Bhagavatula and Mandyam V Srinivasan
Molluscan shells exhibit a wide diversity of pigmentation patterns and are often used as models for understanding the mechanisms underlying biological pattern formation. Numerous mathematical models have been ...
Authors: Alyssa Budd, Carmel McDougall, Kathryn Green and Bernard M Degnan
In previous work, the authors described a software package for the digitisation of 3D landmarks for use in geometric morphometrics. In this paper, we describe extensions to this software that allow semi-automa...
Authors: Paul A Bromiley, Anja C Schunke, Hossein Ragheb, Neil A Thacker and Diethard Tautz
The success of a taxonomic group can be promoted by a key character that allows the group to interact with its environment in a different way and to potentially occupy new niches. The Pomacentridae possess a s...
Authors: Damien Olivier, Bruno Frédérich, Milton Spanopoulos-Zarco, Eduardo F Balart and Eric Parmentier
Daphnia magna exhibits a parthenogenetic reproductive cycle linked to a moulting cycle, but regulatory mechanisms of neither moulting nor reproductive cycle are understood in daphnids. Moulting is regulated by ec...
Authors: Eri Sumiya, Yukiko Ogino, Hitoshi Miyakawa, Chizue Hiruta, Kenji Toyota, Shinichi Miyagawa and Taisen Iguchi
Chitin is a biopolymer that forms the exoskeleton of arthropods, and is found in the cell walls of fungi. It has a wide range of uses in fields such as cosmetics, pharmacy, medicine, bioengineering, agricultur...
Authors: Murat Kaya, Osman Seyyar, Talat Baran and Tuncay Turkes
Many arthropods add body segments post-embryonically, including most of the myriapods. However, geophilomorph and scolopendromorph centipedes are epimorphic, i.e. they form all their segments during embryonic ...
Short post-reproductive lifespan is widespread across species, but prolonged post-reproductive life-stages of potential adaptive significance have been reported only in few mammals with extreme longevity. Long...
Authors: Mirkka Lahdenperä, Khyne U Mar and Virpi Lummaa
The vertebrate brain is a highly energy consuming organ that requires continuous energy provision. Energy metabolism of ectothermic organisms is directly affected by environmental temperature changes and has b...
Authors: Yung-Che Tseng, Sian-Tai Liu, Marian Y Hu, Ruo-Dong Chen, Jay-Ron Lee and Pung-Pung Hwang
The practice of molecular dating is an essential tool for hypothesis testing in evolutionary biology. Vagaries of fossilization and taphonomic bias commonly engender high uncertainty in molecular dating in tax...
Cephalopods have evolved strong acid–base regulatory abilities to cope with CO2 induced pH fluctuations in their extracellular compartments to protect gas transport via highly pH sensitive hemocyanins. To date, t...
Authors: Marian Y Hu, Ying-Jey Guh, Meike Stumpp, Jay-Ron Lee, Ruo-Dong Chen, Po-Hsuan Sung, Yu-Chi Chen, Pung-Pung Hwang and Yung-Che Tseng
