Issues

Summary: We develop a framework for thinking about how tail loss can affect fitness through its effects on locomotion, and review results from past studies to inform and support this framework.

Summary: The ability to tolerate periods of spiracular closure in Paracinema tricolor grasshoppers can facilitate predation avoidance via diving or be used for exploiting underwater resources.

Summary: Honeybees can learn stable foraging routes, minimising the overall travel distances between multiple flower patches.

Summary: A new and intuitive way to represent polarization in photographs using a grid of polarization ellipses superimposed on the image.

Highlighted Article: Compound eye properties of sympatric bull ants restrict diurnal animals to bright-lit habitats, but do not restrict crepuscular and nocturnal animals to their dim-lit niches.

Summary: Ruby-throated hummingbirds appear to use optic flow to stabilize flight, similar to insects, by rotating with and following projected moving patterns in a flight arena.

Summary: The amount of resilin deposited in the two energy stores for jumping in the locust changes with the moulting cycle.

Summary: Body density and diving gas volume, two important but poorly understood physiological characteristics of beaked whales, are revealed through analysis of hydrodynamic performance during glides.

Highlighted Article: Telomeres in edible dormice shorten over the hibernation season, but these long-lived rodents are able to fully restore telomeres during summer if food supply is sufficient.

Summary: Environmental local odours perceived at the release site are sufficient for pigeons’ homeward orientation, but pigeons can successfully home only if they can rely on olfactory cues during flight beyond the release site.

Summary: A predictive metabolic allometric model unites energy costs for transporting substances at a cellular level, discovered to be an important mechanism influencing metabolism of living organisms, with heat dissipation constraints.

Summary: Olfactory cues from the colony refuse influence plant preferences in foraging leaf-cutting ants.

Highlighted Article: The crash-avoidance performance of hoverflies in different visual environments suggests the existence of a multisensory control system based mainly on vision rather than gravity perception.

Summary: Small increases in the abundance of compatible osmolytes improve osmotic balance and cold tolerance in Drosophila.

Summary: Flies uncouple feeding and egg-laying decisions to balance their diet and provide a nutritionally optimal environment for their progeny, indicating a certain complexity in the nutritional ecology of parent–offspring interactions.

Summary: In two size classes of layer chicken, sexually dimorphic walking kinematics is linked to the differential muscle force, work and power demands of varied visceral and muscle proportions.

Highlighted Article: Adult sturgeon energy use during fishway passage reveals location-specific differences in energy use and variable overall net energy costs.

Summary: The dusky dottyback goes through various cryptic stages and modifications of its visual system before turning into one of the most successful fish mimics on tropical coral reefs.

Summary: Thyroid hormones and energy expenditure are correlated in a semi-free-living ungulate.

Summary: In behavioural choice experiments, the water springtail Podura aquatica shows polarotaxis to horizontally polarized light as well as phototaxis.