Behavior of wild vertebrate individuals can vary in response to environmental or social factors. Such within-individual behavioral variation is often mediated by hormonal mechanisms. Hormones also serve as a b...
There is increasing interest in the proximate factors that underpin individual variation in suites of correlated behaviours. In this paper, we propose that dietary macronutrient composition, an underexplored e...
Development in many organisms appears to show evidence of sensitive windows—periods or stages in ontogeny in which individual experience has a particularly strong influence on the phenotype (compared to other ...
Domestication is an evolutionary process during which the biobehavioural profile (comprising e.g. social and emotional behaviour, cognitive abilities, as well as hormonal stress responses) is substantially res...
Authors: Sylvia Kaiser, Michael B Hennessy and Norbert Sachser
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2015
12(Suppl 1):S19
Many, if not all, questions in biology and psychology today were formulated and considered in depth, though typically in a different language, from the 1700's to the early 1900's. However, because of politics ...
Authors: David Crews, Seth A Weisberg and Sahotra Sarkar
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2015
12(Suppl 1):S21
With each trajectory taken during the ontogeny of an individual, the number of optional behavioural phenotypes that can be expressed across its life span is reduced. The initial range of phenotypic plasticity ...
Authors: Vera Brust, Philipp M Schindler and Lars Lewejohann
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2015
12(Suppl 1):S17
Comprehensive explanations of behavioral adaptations rarely invoke all levels famously admonished by Niko Tinbergen. The role of developmental processes and plasticity, in particular, has often been neglected....
Authors: Peter M Kappeler and Claudia Fichtel
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2015
12(Suppl 1):S15
Prenatal conditions influence offspring development in many species. In mammals, the effects of social density have traditionally been considered a detrimental form of maternal stress. Now their potential adap...
Authors: Nikolaus von Engelhardt, Gabriele J Kowalski and Anja Guenther
Citation:Frontiers in Zoology
2015
12(Suppl 1):S13
Carbonic anhydrases (CAs, EC 4.2.1.1) are ubiquitous enzymes that catalyze the reversible hydration reaction of carbon dioxide. CAs are present as six structurally divergent enzyme families: α, β, γ, δ, ζ and ...
Authors: Leo Syrjänen, Susanna Valanne, Marianne Kuuslahti, Tea Tuomela, Ashwin Sriram, Alberto Sanz, Howard T. Jacobs, Mika Rämet and Seppo Parkkila
‘Motion dazzle’ refers to the hypothesis that high contrast patterns such as stripes and zigzags may have evolved in a wide range of animals as they make it difficult to judge the trajectory of an animal in mo...
Authors: Anna E. Hughes, Richard S. Magor-Elliott and Martin Stevens
Predator-induced defences are a prominent example of phenotypic plasticity found from single-celled organisms to vertebrates. The water flea Daphnia pulex is a very convenient ecological genomic model for studyin...
Authors: Andrey Rozenberg, Mrutyunjaya Parida, Florian Leese, Linda C. Weiss, Ralph Tollrian and J. Robert Manak
Butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) constitute one of the most diverse insect orders, and play an important role in ecosystem function. However, little is known in terms of their bacterial communities. Wolbachia,...
Authors: Muhammad Z. Ahmed, Eli V. Araujo-Jnr, John J. Welch and Akito Y. Kawahara
Reconstructing the evolutionary history of nervous systems requires an understanding of their architecture and development across diverse taxa. The spiralians encompass diverse body plans and organ systems, an...
Authors: Néva P Meyer, Allan Carrillo-Baltodano, Richard E Moore and Elaine C Seaver
RNA interference (RNAi) of trait-specific genes permits the manipulation of specific phenotypic traits (“phenotypic engineering”) and thus represents a powerful tool to test trait function in evolutionary stud...
Authors: Roberto Arbore, Kiyono Sekii, Christian Beisel, Peter Ladurner, Eugene Berezikov and Lukas Schärer
The ‘scaly-foot gastropod’ (Chrysomallon squamiferum Chen et al., 2015) from deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems of the Indian Ocean is an active mobile gastropod occurring in locally high densities, and it is ...
Authors: Chong Chen, Jonathan T. Copley, Katrin Linse, Alex D. Rogers and Julia D. Sigwart
The wider availability of non-destructive and high-resolution methods, such as micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), has prompted its use in anatomical and morphometric studies. Yet, because of the actual scan...
Authors: Monique Nouailhetas Simon and Gabriel Marroig
Ocean acidification caused by the anthropogenic release of CO2 is considered a major threat to marine ecosystems. One unexpected impact of elevated water CO2 levels is that behavioral alterations may occur in tro...
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
