Issues

Summary: Understanding how urchins, molluscs and corals extract calcium from seawater to make their skeletons, and the factors that affect this process, improve predictions on their future success under climate change.

Summary: Preferential consumption of ethanol-containing medium can be established on base diets that elicit greater feeding, suggesting that a threshold of ethanol intake is required for developing ethanol preference.

Summary: When flying in a flight mill, flies with constrained body pitch compensate external visual perturbations applied to their retinal slip by changing their flight speed.

Summary: Phospholid content and peroxidation index of cell membranes is lower in Nothobranchius fish species with a higher maximum lifespan potential, in accordance with the longevity–homeoviscous adaptation (LHA) theory of ageing.

Summary: Tail beat kinematics and foraging behavior of filter feeding whale sharks off the Yucatán Peninsula indicate that stroke effort increases with filter feeding, particularly at the surface.

Summary: Despite being produced by the same set of muscles, the vibrations bumblebees produce during buzz-pollination, defensive buzzing and flight all significantly differ in their biomechanical properties.

Summary: Dietary shifts resulted in differential emergences of microbial taxa in the gut microbiomes of Diploptera punctata, impacting microbial essential amino acid provisioning functions that may underlie differences in determined host metabolic phenotypes, measured as standard metabolic rate.

Summary: Cortical bone mineral content has a stronger impact on tissue stiffness than cortical bone structure (Haversian system and central canal size).

Highlighted Article: When amphibious fish (Polypterus senegalus) spend a prolonged time on land, their fin bones change shape and composition in response to increased mechanical loading.

Summary: The gastrulation period represents a critical transition from inherited (maternal) defenses to active homeostatic regulation, which facilitates enhanced resilience of later stages to environmental factors.

Summary: Thermo-TRPs and gut microbiota are involved in attenuating diet-induced obesity during low temperature exposure in C57BL/6J mice.

Summary: Selection for divergent phasing of eclosion rhythms of Drosophila melanogaster results in altered sensitivity of activity rhythms to temperature cues, highlighting common circadian clock organisational principles.

Summary: Pecking pigeons do not fully close their eyes when their beak tip approaches a seed but instead narrow their eyelids to a slit, improving their vision by squinting.

Highlighted Article: In fish, thermal metabolic compensation in response to warming under predicted climate change scenarios may alter brain morphology and cognition, potentially causing fitness impairment.

Highlighted Article: Androgenic signalling boosts muscle twitch speed to support the production of elaborate display behaviour, triggering a trade-off with endurance. This encumbers display length, highlighting a performance cost of steroid action.

Highlighted Article: Whale sharks, the world's largest fish, can dive over 1000 m and have the advantage of maintaining relatively stable body temperatures because of their high thermal inertia.

Summary: The visual spectral sensitivity of a diurnal rodent, Rhabdomys pumilio, is biased against UV-A wavelengths thanks to lens filtering, but not cone spectral sensitivity.

Summary: Oxygen availability does not explain moderate- to long-term thermal performance in Nauphoeta cinerea, which raises further questions about the generality of the OCLTT hypothesis.