Issues

Summary: For decades, homing pigeons have served as the premier model for understanding the mechanisms of bird navigation. However, their value may be diminishing as the study of navigational mechanisms used by migratory and other wild birds becomes more accessible.

Summary: A non-lethal method for measuring temperature inside turtle eggs shows that temperatures inside and outside the egg are the same, and that air temperature differs in a moisture-dependent manner.

Summary: Ants learn about the location of their nest during highly choreographed learning walks. They systematically scan the scene alternating between looking toward and away from the nest from different compass bearings.

Summary: Sperm pre-fertilization thermal environment mediates transgenerational plasticity, which shapes offspring body size, post-hatching performance and also modifies the magnitude of dam effects and compatibility of the gametes.

Highlighted Article: Evidence for Rh protein as a new paradigm for ammonia excretion, with Rh protein-mediated NH₃ movement as the core of ammonia excretion.

Summary: Dietary antioxidants protect the male germline from oxidative damage, and may play an important role in the life-history cost of reproduction for males.

Summary: Developing winged aphids should not be considered as low-quality hosts as they bring a higher fitness to parasitoids.

Summary: Two Hsp40s function differently from one another in diapause entry, stress tolerance and longevity of Artemia franciscana.

Summary: The relationship between environmental temperature and digestive performance in red-backed salamanders may be mediated by temperature-induced changes in the abundance of chitin-digesting gut microbiota.

Highlighted Article: Common tenrecs, Tenrec ecaudatus, which may be representative of ancestral placental mammals, demonstrate extreme physiological plasticity.

Summary: Investigation of differences in the cortical control of the soleus and tibialis anterior muscles highlights profound differences during rest as well as during activity.

Summary: Although the herbicide glyphosate supposedly affects only plants, it impaired learning ability in mosquito larvae in a dose-dependent manner.

Summary: Closely related honeybee species exhibit surprising differences in their spatial resolution and contrast sensitivity when controlling flight.

Summary: Measurements of the optomotor response of the hawkmoth over a range of contrast, spatial and temporal frequencies, and light levels show that this visually driven behavior is adapted to the species’ crepuscular to nocturnal activity period.

Summary: Suspension-feeding sea cucumbers move and orient themselves relative to water flow strength and direction, respectively, to balance anchorage and feeding imperatives.

Highlighted Article: Variation in tree seeding leads to pronounced differences in fecal glucocorticoid metabolite levels in dormice, but the downregulation of reproductive function in mast-failure years is not caused by stress.

Summary: Laterality for escape behaviour is modulated by environmental context, leading to possible unexplored relationships for behavioural responses, above all in reptiles, in which brain lateralization is still poorly investigated.

Summary: Vibrational playback experiments demonstrate the hypothesized role of vibrations in adult–larval communications in paper wasps and do not support the long-held hypothesis of salivary release modulation.

Summary: Integrating aerodynamic, kinematic and muscle recordings confirms Weis-Fogh's hypothesis that hummingbirds and flies converged on a wingbeat driven by elastic recoil that incurs low induced power to hover efficiently.

Highlighted Article: Mammals swing their tails three times faster than a gravity-driven pendulum. Our experiments with artificial tails show that tail motion generates winds sufficient to repel mosquitoes.