Issues

Summary: Animal musculoskeletal designs must be finely tuned to variation in body weight. Various mechanisms that allow such fine tuning are discussed.

Summary: The cardiorespiratory performance of Antarctic fish may limit the extent of thermal plasticity during acclimation, rendering them more sensitive to warming.

Summary: Each honey bee possesses her own calibration: individual duration–distance calibrations vary significantly in both slopes and intercepts. This variation may incur a cost for communication.

Summary: Heat tolerance in Manduca sexta larvae is affected by both the magnitude and the temporal pattern of previous exposure to high temperatures.

Summary: Hearing dynamic social stimuli, like frog choruses, can alter the responses of the auditory periphery in a way that could enhance detection of and response to conspecific acoustic communication.

Highlighted Article: Pre-competent, 6-armed larval urchins swim faster and are less stable in experimental turbulent flow than younger 4-armed larvae, suggesting a potential age/morphology-driven differential transport mechanism in ambient flow conditions.

Summary: Force enhancement is absent in sarcomeres where amino acids in N2A and PEVK titin are deleted, indicating these specific regions are paramount in increasing titin stiffness in an active sarcomere.

Summary: Squid and cuttlefish are capable of high maneuverability and agility through coordination of a unique muscular hydrostat-driven propulsive system involving paired fins and a pulsed jet.

Summary: Lactating striped hamsters show significant plasticity in digestive tract morphology and enzyme activity, which increases reproductive performance.

Highlighted Article: A heat shock experienced by a snail enhances the snail's ability to form long-term memory; the up-regulation of heat shock proteins is a necessary requirement for this memory enhancement process.

Summary: An animal homolog of plant and bacterial ammonium transporters supports ammonia excretion at the anal papillae of mosquito larvae.

Summary: Variation in performance among individual fish is associated with differences in their mitochondrial leak respiration rate and respiratory control ratio.

Highlighted Article: A sexual abstinence experiment suggests that a difference in copulation frequency rather than an adaption to sperm competition provides Carollia perspicillata sneaker males with higher sperm quality than harem males.

Summary: Blue tits with relatively larger wings have higher escape take-off performance, indicating that moult could increase the risk of predation.

Summary: Internal melanin in melanocytes and melanomacrophages protects cells and organs of frogs against short-term external UVR exposure.

Summary: Glucose utilized by fish hearts is converted exclusively to lactate and not used to support aerobic metabolism. ATP produced in the cytosol may be a requirement for ionic regulation.

Highlighted Article: Spectral sensitivity shifts to longer wavelengths in the freshwater crocodile compared with the saltwater crocodile, while the visual acuity of both species remains the same.

Summary: Shorebird species with higher values of limb rotational inertia flex their limbs more during terrestrial locomotion; swing phase kinematics may therefore be strongly tied to limb rotational inertia.