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
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 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
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 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
