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Cover image
Cover Image
Cover: Desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, achieve remarkable orientation feats when foraging in the featureless salt pans of Northern Africa. They combine a skylight compass and a distance gauge to perform vector navigation or dead reckoning. Distance measurement by a stride integrator (colloquially, 'step counter') has been discovered only recently and deserves further scrutiny, particularly regarding resistance against disturbances and accuracy. K. Steck, M. Wittlinger and H. Wolf (pp. 2893−2901) trained the ants to forage across corrugated sheets, which caused them to stumble or run into the slopes of oncoming corrugation hills. Despite such severe impairments of walking behaviour, distance measurement of the animals remained virtually unaffected. Photo by K. Steck. - PDF Icon PDF LinkTable of contents
New funding schemes for junior faculty staff
In celebration of our 100th anniversary, JEB has launched two new grants to support junior faculty staff working in animal comparative physiology and biomechanics who are within five years of setting up their first lab/research group. Check out our ECR Visiting Fellowships and Research Partnership Kickstart Travel Grants.
JEB@100: an interview with Monitoring Editor Stuart Egginton
Stuart Egginton reveals how he overcame the challenges of being a comparative physiologist in a medical school and how he would tell his younger self to trust his instincts when pursuing new ideas.
Travelling Fellowships from JEB
Our Travelling Fellowships offer up to £3,000 to graduate students and post-doctoral researchers wishing to make collaborative visits to other laboratories. Next deadline to apply is 27 October 2023
Feedforward and feedback control in the neuromechanics
Auke J. Ijspeert and Monica A. Daley provide an overview of key knowledge gained from comparative vertebrate experiments and insights obtained from neuromechanical simulations and robotic approaches. Read the full Centenary Review Article here.
Light fine-tunes electric fish pulses to keep them in the shade
Weakly electric fish perceive their surroundings through electric chirrups and now Ana Camargo & colleagues have revealed that light fine-tunes the fish's electric pulses to ensure that they remain scheduled beneath the mats of vegetation they use for shelter, avoiding penetrating beams of light that could give them away.
