Issues

Summary: Large oxygen reserves and oxygen-conserving mechanisms that support diving are underdeveloped at birth in pinnipeds and cetaceans. This Review explores how underdeveloped physiology makes immature marine mammals vulnerable to disturbance.

Summary: Current knowledge about how female mate choice occurs within the brain is discussed along with future avenues of research that will broaden our current knowledge of this process.

Summary: Conspecific chemical cues induce metabolic suppression independently of food, and this metabolic reduction is associated with the downregulation of physiological processes rather than feeding activity.

Summary: The complex acoustic repertoires of beluga whales are enabled by lateralized sound production using two phonic lip pairs in their nasal complex.

Summary: A new workflow for marker-based XROMM that integrates XMALab and DeepLabCut to dramatically improve marker tracking throughput for large-scale studies.

Summary: Argentine ants associate a floral odor with food reward during foraging. Pre-exposure to trail pheromone enhances the ants’ subjective evaluation of reward, but does not modify appetitive learning and memory.

Summary: Substrate geometry has a major influence on stick insect attachment. Traction force decreases and pull-off force increases with increasing curvature.

Highlighted Article: Many lizard species can depress body temperature below air temperature via panting and evaporative cooling. This capacity varies greatly among species and the initiation of panting provides a modest, but not definitive estimate of an animal’s critical thermal maxima.

Highlighted Article: Seal lice can survive pressures of 200 kg cm⁻², equivalent to 2000 m depth, revealing unique adaptation to extreme marine conditions.

Summary: Utricular potentials of the plainfin midshipman reveal that the utricle is highly sensitive to particle motion in the horizontal plane and is well suited to detect conspecific vocalizations.

Summary: Pre-absorptive sensing of amino acids, at least partially mediated by taste-signalling mechanisms, elicits a satiety signal that in the hypothalamus is translated into changes in cellular signalling and neuropeptides regulating food intake in fish.

Summary: Some salamanders can cling fully inverted despite lacking claws or toe pads. Cling performance is impacted by scaling of body surface area to mass, and also by behavior and morphology.

Summary: Data from five species of cetaceans show a strong respiratory sinus arrythmia and an important cardiorespiratory coupling that enhances gas exchange.

Summary: These findings suggest that exposure to wind considerably improves reproductive performance, increasing the fitness of small mammals in hot temperatures during heatwaves.

Summary: FFA1 and FFA4 contribute to the detection of fatty acids in fish brain and are involved in food intake regulation through mechanisms not exactly comparable to those known in mammals.

Summary: Paracellular transport in S. pistillata was investigated using calcein imaging. Changes in paracellular permeability could form an uncharacterised aspect of the physiological response of S. pistillata to seawater acidification.

Summary: Time-resolved X-ray diffraction shows that a muscle's lattice of molecular machinery dilates and stretches during natural movement. Although such motions influence force production, their temporal patterns vary among individuals.

Summary: In European eel, the immune response to nematode Anguillicoloides crassus infection increases swimbladder wall thickness, so raising the pressure required for organ rupture, but decreases strength, thus explaining previous incongruous findings on the swimbladder response to infection.

Highlighted Article: Environmental challenges during development alter progeny immuno-neuroendocrine traits with potentially favourable outcomes if the same stressors experienced by the parental generation are encountered later.