Issues

Summary: This Commentary discusses the ammonia excretion strategies of invertebrates inhabiting a variety of different aquatic environments as well as the roles of excretory proteins in acid–base homeostasis.

Summary: Transcriptomic assessments, through functional analyses and the determination of negative impact thresholds, allow for a broad understanding of the mechanisms that regulate an organism's ability to respond to environmental change.

Summary: Three-striped poison frogs (Ameerega trivittata) can navigate home via a direct path from areas exceeding the range of their routine movements.

Summary: Common shrews reduce their brain mass by 21% in winter, likely to cope with seasonal fluctuations in resources, and then regrow it by 17% the following spring, but spatial learning task experiments suggest they do so at the cost of a reduced cognitive ability in winter.

Summary: Aquatic animal speed correlates exponentially with high-frequency accelerometer motion in underwater animal-attached devices, and the quantification of this motion can be used as a speed metric.

Summary: Myosin regulatory light chain phosphorylation potentiates dynamic contractile function of mouse fast skeletal muscles in vitro without decreasing contractile economy.

Summary: Myosin regulatory light chain phosphorylation increases the contractile economy (mechanical output:metabolic input) of wild-type mouse fast muscle compared with muscles devoid of the enzyme responsible for regulatory light chain phosphorylation.

Summary: Rainbow trout behave like lipolytic machines that constantly mobilize lipid reserves in excess of energy requirements. High baseline lipolytic rates are not modulated by exercise, even when metabolic rate triples.

Summary: Mild crowding improves thermotolerance of Drosophila melanogaster larvae through potential hormetic mechanisms triggered by exposure to metabolic waste.

Highlighted Article: Polarization-sensitive neurons of the locust central complex show azimuth-dependent responses to unpolarized light spots, suggesting that direct sunlight supports the sky polarization compass in this brain area.

Summary: In pigs, changes in food toughness impact chewing cycle duration and thus chewing frequency whereas changes in food stiffness alter phase duration within each cycle, with little effect on cycle duration.

Summary: Contractile properties and temperature effects are similar in tongue muscles from salamander species with different tongue-projection performance and mechanism (muscle power versus elastic recoil).

Summary: During a single larval instar, moths accumulated less and more mass before moulting under experimentally decreased and increased oxygen partial pressure, respectively, emphasising the role of oxygen in moult induction.

Summary: New analysis supported by high-speed videos explains how some copepods can perform out-of-water escape jumps when aided by well-timed kicks when penetrating the surface.

Summary: Hypoxia causes a decrease in metabolic rate, which is supported in part by a decrease in protein synthesis, and regulated by cell signaling pathways.

Summary: Characteristics of initial outbound flights of bumblebees lead to a hypothesis how bumblebees use information gained in the close vicinity of their inconspicuous nest hole to return to their home location.

Highlighted Article: Diapause in a temperate butterfly is associated with a highly dynamic metabolome, and its termination, once initiated by cold, is associated with temperature-independent changes in profiles of several key metabolites.

Highlighted Article: The hardness of aposematic weevils functions as an adaptive secondary defence against predator lizards, supporting Wallace's hypothesis of aposematism.

Summary: Theoretical models and empirical results reveal that functional differentiation of the limbs of quadrupeds in terms of net braking and propulsive roles is driven, in part, by the relative position of the limb point of contact relative to the center of mass.

Summary: Fruit flies pinpoint the precise location of an odor source by integrating information derived from their visual and olfactory modalities, in both moving and still air.

Summary: The ability to respond to light and/or chemical gradients varies between Allomyces zoospores, a new model for sensory evolution; A. arbusculus behavior represents a multimodal, sensorimotor system in unicellular fungi.

Summary: The prevalence of the jaw elevator triplet motor pattern during mastication is established in five different primate species.