Issues

Summary: Immunity does not necessarily affect sperm performance or sperm and blood oxidative balance; however, social hierarchy and the relative soma/germline oxidative balance determine sperm performance.

Summary: Food availability in oysters both enhances disease susceptibility through increased growth and limits it through increased energy reserves. Increasing the physiological condition of the host and reducing growth rate could mitigate epidemics.

Summary: Experimental manipulations show that pied flycatchers do not adjust the timing of their moult and migration to the termination of breeding.

Summary: Increased expression of microRNA-29b decreases collagen type I synthesis in rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) cardiac fibroblasts, suggesting that this microRNA could play a role in temperature-induced changes in collagen content in the trout heart.

Summary: Neurons in the dragonfly brain dynamically adjust their gain to improve target detection, enabling robust tracking of targets amidst dynamically changing conditions.

Summary: The occurrence of shell damage is a traumatic, stressful event that results in enhanced long-term memory formation in Lymnaea stagnalis. The resulting stress is mitigated by an anti-anxiety drug, a high-Ca²⁺ pond water environment and a DNA methylation blocker.

Summary: Maternal undernutrition during prenatal and early postnatal life induces differential morphological changes along the diverse brain structures of the offspring.

Summary: Gastrointestinal blood flow of seawater-acclimated fish is fine-tuned to elevate water absorption and maintain osmotic balance during acute temperature increases.

Editors' Choice: Exposure to environmental stressors may be detrimental for a population; however, it may prompt epigenetically inherited adaptive phenotypes in the offspring, acting as a bridge for survival when persistent stressors occur.

Summary: Neither high nor low BMR mice benefitted from increasing their thermal conductivity at peak lactation, which does not support the heat dissipation limitation hypothesis.

Summary: Variation in candidate gene expression in the ovary and liver explains variation in egg-laying dates in a songbird, indicative of downstream regulation of the timing of breeding.

Highlighted Article: The rate that mussel body temperatures increase during emersion affects cardiac thermal tolerance; heating rates experienced based on animals' intertidal height must be considered when evaluating ecological consequences of climate change.

Highlighted Article: Connecting the legs with a spring assists runners in swinging their legs, enabling them to take faster, shorter, more efficient strides.

Summary: The ontogenetic scaling of muscle–tendon morphology and tendon material properties suggests maintained or relatively increased muscle force generation, increased elastic energy storage and locomotor economy in adult versus juvenile ostriches.

Summary: Larval fish preferentially target large moving prey, but have a hard time capturing this preferred prey because their suction flows are often too weak to counter the prey's escape response.

Summary: Different mitochondrial haplotypes of Carcinus maenas in the Gulf of Maine, derived from multiple biological introductions, have a strong, male-specific effect on whether invasive crabs can right themselves under cold stress, while two candidate nuclear loci have no such effect.

Summary: Color discrimination thresholds of cichlids can be obtained through visually mediated tasks, enabling investigation of the role of vision in cichlid ecology, sexual selection and speciation.

Summary: Crazy ants excel at cooperative transport despite wide load variation. Effects of load properties vary across transport challenges, and groups struggling to move large loads may find obstacle navigation easier.

Highlighted Article: Identification of TGF ligand and TGF receptor (TGFr) superfamily members establishes the functional involvement of the TGF pathway in sponge tissue regeneration.