Issues

Summary: Root effect haemoglobins and plasma-accessible carbonic anhydrase may be responsible for the ability of fishes to maintain oxygen transport during high P_CO2 conditions.

Summary: Multicomponent social signals are analysed separately in the two brain hemispheres in lizards wherein laterality is observed in response to social colour stimuli but not in response to motion stimuli.

Highlighted Article: Data from this paper indicate that there may be a ‘soft’ limit dependent on female ‘choice’ on energy allocation to their litters, rather than a ‘hard’, unbreachable limit defined by aspects of maternal physiology as is commonly assumed.

Summary: Triploid juvenile Atlantic salmon achieve similar aerobic capacities and critical thermal maxima to those of their diploid conspecifics.

Highlighted Article: Alarm and aggregation pheromones modulate the subjective evaluation of aversive stimuli in an insect, thus contributing to behavioral plasticity beyond their stereotyped role as chemical messengers.

Summary: Transcriptomic profiling of liver tissue in a cold-adapted fish suggests tight coupling of temperature responses and daily rhythms.

Highlighted Article: In climbing tree frogs where both adhesion and gripping are possible, they combine to achieve faster, more efficient movement, involving tubercles as well as toe pads.

Summary: To compensate for acid–base disturbances, teleost fish activate acid- and/or base-transporting mechanisms at the gill. In trout, the abundance of ionocyte types, as well as the proportion of ionocytes that expresses carbonic anhydrase are altered to respond to acid–base disturbances.

Summary: Investigation of auditory attention networks in the Emei music frog (Babina daunchina) supports the idea that the frog brain allocates neural attention resources to attractive sounds and that such processing is sexually dimorphic.

Summary: Mormyrid weakly electric fish can track a moving source of electric communication signals relying only on their passive electrosensory modality.

Summary: Podarcis muralis are able to discriminate hue differences matching their own ventral colour variation; this has implications for unravelling the evolution and adaptive significance of colour polymorphisms.

Summary: Hyperbaric oxygen pretreatment 18 h prior to diving significantly reduces the risk of decompression sickness in a swine model; heat shock protein induction is proposed as the underlying mechanism.

Summary: In insect cold tolerance, cold impairs rectal reabsorption whereas cold acclimation enhances water but not potassium reabsorption, highlighting the role of the hindgut in the preservation of extracellular homeostasis.

Summary: A soft robotic exosuit designed to assist the paretic limb during walking can induce more symmetrical body center of mass power generation by the paretic and non-paretic limbs and reduce metabolic power consumption during hemiparetic walking.

Summary: The distal ileac plexus of larval lepidopterans recycles ions using gap junctions, and switches between ion secretion and reabsorption in response to input from the upstream components of the tubule.

Summary: Lobsters avoid artificial dens below strong magnets, suggesting that magnetic anomalies might affect lobster orientation and movement.

Summary: Triptolide, the hypothesized toxic compound in nectar of the thunder god vine, can reduce bee memory of a rewarded odor.

Summary: The loss of iron-centered oxygen-binding proteins in Antarctic fishes does not correspond with an overall reduction in levels of oxidized macromolecules, antioxidants or rates of protein degradation.