Articles

Geographic body size variation in ectotherms: effects of seasonality on an anuran from the southern temperate forest

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

Intra-cellular bacterial infections affect learning and memory capacities of an invertebrate

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...

Authors: Noémie Templé and Freddie-Jeanne Richard

Ultrastructural study of vitellogenesis of Ligula intestinalis (Diphyllobothriidea) reveals the presence of cytoplasmic-like cell death in cestodes

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

Inferring muscular ground patterns in Bivalvia: Myogenesis in the scallop Nodipecten nodosus

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

Performance of single and multi-atlas based automated landmarking methods compared to expert annotations in volumetric microCT datasets of mouse mandibles

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...

Authors: Ryan Young and A. Murat Maga

Chemical cues and pheromones in the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus)

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

Young male mating success is associated with sperm number but not with male sex pheromone titres

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

Mandible evolution in the Scarabaeinae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) and adaptations to coprophagous habits

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

Neurons of self-defence: neuronal innervation of the exocrine defence glands in stick insects

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

Comparative morphology of the nervous system in three phylactolaemate bryozoans

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

The relationship between poison frog chemical defenses and age, body size, and sex

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

Quality of public information matters in mate-choice copying in female zebra finches

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

Host sex and age influence endoparasite burdens in the gray mouse lemur

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

iDNA from terrestrial haematophagous leeches as a wildlife surveying and monitoring tool – prospects, pitfalls and avenues to be developed

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 phantoms of a high-seven - or - why do our thumbs stick out?

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...

Authors: Joost M. Woltering and Axel Meyer

Visualizing sound: counting wolves by using a spectral view of the chorus howling

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

The relationship between defecation and feeding in nestling birds: observational and experimental evidence

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

Is a change in juvenile hormone sensitivity involved in range expansion in an invasive beetle?

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

Hazards inherent in interdisciplinary behavioral research

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

The Snark was a Boojum - reloaded

In this article, we refer to an original opinion paper written by Prof. Frank Beach in 1950 (“The Snark was a Boojum”). In his manuscript, Beach explicitly criticised the field of comparative psychology becaus...

Authors: Simone Macrì and S Helene Richter

Domestication affects the structure, development and stability of biobehavioural profiles

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

Stability and change: Stress responses and the shaping of behavioral phenotypes over the life span

In mammals, maternal signals conveyed via influences on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity may shape behavior of the young to be better adapted for prevailing environmental conditions. However, the ...

Authors: Michael B Hennessy, Sylvia Kaiser, Tobias Tiedtke and Norbert Sachser

Lifetime development of behavioural phenotype in the house mouse (Mus musculus)

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

Integrating resource defence theory with a neural nonapeptide pathway to explain territory-based mating systems

The ultimate-level factors that drive the evolution of mating systems have been well studied, but an evolutionarily conserved neural mechanism involved in shaping behaviour and social organization across speci...

Authors: Ronald G Oldfield, Rayna M Harris and Hans A Hofmann

Eco-evo-devo of the lemur syndrome: did adaptive behavioral plasticity get canalized in a large primate radiation?

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

Paternal early experiences influence infant development through non-social mechanisms in Rhesus Macaques

Early experiences influence the developing organism, with lifelong and potentially adaptive consequences. It has recently become clear that the effects of early experiences are not limited to the exposed gener...

Authors: Erin L Kinnally and John P Capitanio

The maternal social environment shapes offspring growth, physiology, and behavioural phenotype in guinea pigs

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

Stable individual differences in separation calls during early development in cats and mice

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

Zebra finch males compensate in plumage ornaments at sexual maturation for a bad start in life

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

Parental food provisioning is related to nestling stress response in wild great tit nestlings: implications for the development of personality

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

Personality over ontogeny in zebra finches: long-term repeatable traits but unstable behavioural syndromes

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 ...

Authors: Yvonne Wuerz and Oliver Krüger

Behavioural phenotypes over the lifetime of a holometabolous insect

Introduction: Behavioural traits can differ considerably between individuals, and such differences were found to be consistent over the lifetime of an organism in several species. Whether behavioural traits of...

Authors: Thorben Müller and Caroline Müller

Endocrine mechanisms, behavioral phenotypes and plasticity: known relationships and open questions

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...

Authors: Michaela Hau and Wolfgang Goymann

Introducing biological realism into the study of developmental plasticity in behaviour

There is increasing attention for integrating mechanistic and functional approaches to the study of (behavioural) development. As environments are mostly unstable, it is now often assumed that genetic parental...

Authors: Ton G G Groothuis and Barbara Taborsky

Effect of diet on the structure of animal personality

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...

Authors: Chang S Han and Niels J Dingemanse

Plasticity as a developing trait: exploring the implications

Individual differences in plasticity have been classically framed as genotype-by-environment interactions, with different genotypes showing different reaction norms in response to environmental conditions. How...

Authors: Marco Del Giudice

Adaptive explanations for sensitive windows in development

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 ...

Authors: Tim W Fawcett and Willem E Frankenhuis

The importance of genotype-by-age interactions for the development of repeatable behavior and correlated behaviors over lifetime

Behaviors are highly plastic and one aspect of this plasticity is behavioral changes over age. The presence of age-related plasticity in behavior opens up the possibility of between-individual variation in age...

Authors: Jon E Brommer and Barbara Class

New perspectives in behavioural development: adaptive shaping of behaviour over a lifetime?

Authors: Fritz Trillmich, Anja Günther, Caroline Müller, Klaus Reinhold and Norbert Sachser

β carbonic anhydrase is required for female fertility in Drosophila melanogaster

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

The role of stripe orientation in target capture success

‘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

Transcriptional profiling of predator-induced phenotypic plasticity in Daphnia pulex

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

Wolbachia in butterflies and moths: geographic structure in infection frequency

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

Nervous system development in lecithotrophic larval and juvenile stages of the annelid Capitella teleta

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

Positional RNA-Seq identifies candidate genes for phenotypic engineering of sexual traits

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 heart of a dragon: 3D anatomical reconstruction of the ‘scaly-foot gastropod’ (Mollusca: Gastropoda: Neomphalina) reveals its extraordinary circulatory system

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

Landmark precision and reliability and accuracy of linear distances estimated by using 3D computed micro-tomography and the open-source TINA Manual Landmarking Tool software

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

Juvenile Atlantic cod behavior appears robust to near-future CO₂ levels

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...

Authors: Fredrik Jutfelt and Maria Hedgärde

Identification of a self-regulatory pheromone system that controls nymph aggregation behavior of rice spittlebug Callitettix versicolor

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...

Authors: Xu Chen and Ai-Ping Liang

Linking habitat suitability to demography in a pond-breeding amphibian

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