Issues

Summary: The plasticity of the avian pectoralis muscle provides the perfect system with which to address generalizable principles relating to the underlying structure of muscle and how it changes within the organism.

Summary: This Review aims to place rheotaxis in a larger behavioral and multisensory context to enhance our understanding of the biophysical and sensorineural basis of this simple behavior.

Summary: Testing of an orb weaver's predation strategy in distorted webs reveals that despite the distortion, spiders remained effective at identifying, locating and capturing prey, but take somewhat longer to do so.

Summary: Demonstration of an association between ventricular activation and stretch patterns in the amphibian heart, implying the existence of a stretch–excitation relationship that may explain the variability of cardiac excitation in ectotherms.

Summary: Lifespan extension under dietary restriction can occasionally be obscured. In Drosophila melanogaster, a robust appreciation of dietary reaction norms is necessary to conclude an absence of the dietary restriction longevity effect.

Summary: Feeding on high-lipid prey reduces survival before maturation and delays egg laying among females in a small, sit-and-wait, sheet web-building spider, Hylyphantes graminicola.

Summary: We show that critical thermal maximum (CT_max), measured at a rapid warming rate, is a relevant proxy for more prolonged thermal challenges, but cannot be used to predict growth rate in zebrafish.

Summary: Delayed dispersal from the natal nest by male paper wasps is regulated by juvenile hormone and associated with sexual maturation.

Highlighted Article: Dung beetles respond to temperature fluctuations in different ways depending on the amplitude of fluctuation. However, any temperature fluctuation increased transcripts associated with open chromatin structure relative to constant temperatures.

Summary: Associative learning is not tightly linked with the evolution of collective motion, but provides a starting point towards understanding the underlying patterns that drive collective motion.

Summary: Offspring growth and polyunsaturated fatty acid (LC-PUFA) utilization is linked to parental long-chain biosynthesis capacity and nutrition during the spawning period.

Summary: Robust evidence of evaporative water loss control for a tiny arid-habitat dasyurid marsupial is provided by the comparison of two independent techniques for manipulating the evaporative environment.

Summary: In humans, carrying loads on the swinging arms is as costly as carrying loads at the waist, despite the expectation that swinging a mass about a limb should be much more costly.

Summary: Tethered flying bees exhibit polarotaxis under an overhead rotating e-vector stimulus, in which their right-and-left abdominal movements coincide with the rotation of the stimulus, indicating that flying bees utilize e-vector information from the skylight for steering.

Summary: Fiddler crabs have the physiological basis for colour vision with two distinct photoreceptors: one sensitive to ultraviolet and one sensitive to blue. There are diurnal shifts in their spectral sensitivity.

Highlighted Article: Related albatrosses have similar guard-stage foraging costs despite life history and foraging strategy differences; however, lighter forecasted wind in endemic albatross ranges may increase take-off costs and increase sit-and-wait strategies.

Highlighted Article: Modelling of high-accuracy GPS recordings shows zebra moving between grazeland and water can navigate using multiple distinct routes; they do not need to use the same route every journey.

Highlighted Article: Antagonistic effects of maternal antibodies and egg testosterone modulate offspring telomere length over growth in zebra finch fledglings.