Issues

Summary: The daily temporal niche of animals is adaptive and depends on environmental and physiological context.

Summary: Lasius niger ant queens compare their own status of fertility with that of their rivals before deciding whether to engage in lethal interactions.

Summary: Copepods that possess myelinated axons are better at localizing an abrupt hydromechanical stimulus than those that lack myelin. This advantage might have been a factor in the evolution of myelin.

Summary: The R package LoLinR provides methods to reliably and reproducibly estimate monotonic biological rates from non-linear time series data applicable to many research disciplines in the biological sciences.

Highlighted Article: Intertidal oysters are more vulnerable to ocean acidification than subtidal oysters, and this may limit their vertical distribution.

Summary: Na⁺ uptake occurs as Na⁺/NH₄⁺ exchange by the gills, but not the yolk sac skin, of early­ life stage rainbow trout, possibly resulting from the lack of the key transporter NHE2 in the yolk sac epithelium.

Summary: Sexual size dimorphism in a male-larger lizard is influenced by neither male gonadal androgens nor female reproductive allocation, but instead is controlled by ovarian hormones.

Summary: Integration of multiple techniques reveals that incline affects the relationship between muscle activity and potential force and perch diameter impacts the propulsive contribution of the gastrocnemius in Anolis equestris.

Summary: Differences in muscle synergies during incline and level walking provide further evidence of the flexible use of a consistent set of neural elements in human neuromuscular control.

Highlighted Article: Rat ultrasonic vocalizations are composed of identifiable vocal motor gestures that are combined and re-combined within a single breath.

Summary: Hagfishes use a variety of techniques to squeeze through tight spaces, which is relevant to their ecological roles as burrowers and scavengers.

Summary: Rapid unloading of intact wild-type and Ttn mutant soleus muscles indicates that titin, an elastic element within muscle sarcomeres, is activated upon Ca²⁺ influx in skeletal muscle.

Summary: Seasonal changes occur in the relationship between thyroid hormone levels and resting metabolic rate in free-living African striped mice: a negative relationship exists in the moist season but not the dry season.

Summary: Chinese bulbuls increase basal thermogenesis in response to colder temperature and shorter photoperiod; increases in mitochondrial state-4 respiration capacity and cytochrome c oxidase activity may play a role in this phenotypic flexibility.

Summary: Courtship song dynamics arise from finely tuned motor circuits. Alterations in the activity of a key nucleus of the hindbrain vocal circuit accompany call pattern divergence during speciation in African clawed frogs.

Summary: In caterpillars, exposure to a predator induces a change in immune strategy, optimizing immune function according to the physiological state.

Summary: Multiple prey cues induce spiders to alter web architecture and silk properties to plastically switching foraging strategies.

Summary: Tropical amblypygids inhabit structurally complex habitats, yet navigate home in the dark after a night hunting prey; olfaction appears to be important for navigation.

Highlighted Article: There is a ‘cost’ of being ‘smart’ compared with being ‘average’. This cost is an inability to cope with a stressor.

Summary: Lactobacillus plantarum^WJL is beneficial to Drosophila physiology across its entire life cycle, triggering the early emergence and longer survival of fit and fertile adults.

Summary: Squid display differences in attack strategies and use of turning performance measures depending on the type of prey they encounter.

Summary: Physiological constraints on energy acquisition, body mass and the energetic costs of ambient temperature affect the way that neotropical nectar-feeding bats use torpor as an energy-saving strategy.

Summary: Bumblebee males leave their nest directly, but they perform learning flights when they leave artificial flowers, during which they turn back and fixate the flowers.

Summary: Temperature has similar effects on the motor control of feeding mechanisms in salamanders whether powered by muscle or by elastic recoil.