Issues

Summary: Any aquatic vertebrate aiming for a terrestrial lifestyle must change from its aquatic to a terrestrial feeding mechanism, and we synthesize mechanical challenges associated with such aquatic–terrestrial transitions in vertebrates.

Summary: Ligation of both atria had little effect on cardiac output in anesthetized American alligators and, surprisingly, increased pulmonary blood flow. This suggests atria have a non-essential role in ventricular filling.

Summary: Locomotor performance training modifies baseline metabolic expenditure such that trained animals have lower resting metabolic costs than controls.

Editors' choice: Sea spiders are a group of arthropods that lack gills but still grow to large sizes; cuticular pores facilitate oxygen diffusion in large species to meet their metabolic demands.

Summary: Brain mitochondrial function changes with aggressive social interactions and corresponds to age-related shifts in aggression in the honey bee.

Summary: Giant danios cannot school normally 2 weeks after lateral line ablation, even though the sensory hair cells have fully regenerated.

Summary: Heart mitochondria show suppressed reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation when isolated from anoxic turtles. Surprisingly, complex I S-nitrosation, a potent modification inhibiting ROS production, is not involved in this response.

Summary: Harbour seals are able to detect a variety of different vortex rings and are capable of analysing the travel direction of a single vortex ring perceived by the mystacial vibrissae.

Summary: Little is known about how terrain affects an animal's agility; we establish that a low-friction surface reduces agility and decreases the movement speeds chosen by a small marsupial.

Summary: Sensory specialisations, such as echolocation, usually improve perception, but often come with costs. Echolocating bats can trade off these costs by combining two types of acoustic information, active echolocation and passive hearing.

Summary: HSP90 mediates the larval settlement process of Bugula neritina by interacting with the NO pathway.

Highlighted Article: The cells of the blind mole rat Spalax carmeli show enhanced DNA repair capacity and resistance to several genotoxic agents, which may contribute to its longevity and reduced cancer rates.

Summary: In the goldfish, temperature positively affects metabolic level but negatively affects the scaling exponent of resting metabolic rate, supporting the metabolic-level boundaries hypothesis.

Summary: Insect genitalia are fashioned from numerous constituent parts but the function of individual components is poorly understood. Microsurgical manipulation reveals the parameres and end-plate to be crucial in securing copulation in Callosobruchus maculatus.

Summary: Littorina obtusata employs different thermal strategies at different life-history stages, suggesting an adaptive trade-off between acute and chronic thermal tolerance. Predictions of the impact of global warming based on only adult responses may underestimate vulnerability.

Highlighted Article: The fluted giant clam, Tridacna squamosa, expresses a urea active transporter, DUR3-like, in its ctenidium which may participate in light-enhanced urea absorption.

Summary: Long-term fasting of tegu lizards during seasonal dormancy imposes extra digestion costs for GI tract regrowth post-dormancy but this is negligible compared with the overall energetic savings from GI tract atrophy.

Highlighted Article: Bonobo digit pressures are significantly greater during arboreal knuckle-walking than during either vertical or suspensory locomotion, and the thumb experiences low or no pressure during all locomotor modes.

Summary: Stereotypical behaviors at extreme temperatures correspond to loss of muscular function, and yield repeatable estimates of CT_min and CT_max for bumble bees.

Summary: Amphibious fishes may respond to hypoxic water by escaping and breathing air, rather than improving aquatic respiratory function, in contrast to typical water-breathing species.

Summary: The neuroendocrine response to acute stress and repeated stress of farmed juvenile rainbow trout is related to their individual time of emergence, but has no influence on their performance in captivity.