Issues

Summary: We suggest that flying insects exhibit a great resilience to wing injuries not only because wings have evolved to be damage tolerant but also because insects might compensate for wing damage by altering wing kinematics.

Summary: Caspase-3 immunoexpression in testes of Cobitis taenia and natural tetraploid Cobitis hybrids provides new insights into the reproductive physiology of polyploid fishes, underlining the role of apoptosis during spermatogenesis.

Summary: Tandem run followers of Temnothorax ants learn specific routes from their leaders.

Summary: Honeybees exhibit a range of numerical abilities following dedicated training; as shown here, they also demonstrate a limited spontaneous ability to discriminate different quantities of artificial flowers.

Summary: The New Zealand rockwren lives permanently at high altitudes on South Island, faces low temperatures and deep snow falls in winter, feeds on insects, goes into torpor, and may tolerate winter by hibernation.

Highlighted Article: Highly alkaline guts act as a first line of immunity in echinoderm larvae.

Highlighted Article: Larval fish struggle to capture their prey, which sometimes slips out of the mouth as it is closing. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model reveals that this is due to reversal of the flows within the mouth, which is characteristic of slow strikes by small larvae.

Summary: The brains from six species of hypoxia-tolerant African mole-rats use different molecular mechanisms to tolerate severe hypoxia.

Summary: Pharaoh ant colonies infected with the endosymbiotic bacteria Wolbachia have increased colony growth, increased reproductive investment and an accelerated life cycle, which may increase the colony invasiveness.

Summary: Pressure change during vertical migrations of sharks has little effect on buoyancy because liver oil and seawater have almost equal compressibility. Temperature and salinity effects dominate, possibly influencing behaviour and swimming performance.

Summary: Zebra finches can vocally recognize conspecifics even if the conspecifics all sing the same song. They do so by relying on spectro-temporal details of syllables rather than on syllable sequences.

Summary: Fatigue from sustained aerobic exercise can be used to measure sub-lethal tolerance of acute warming in fishes.

Summary: Transient exposure to high temperature during lactation stunts growth and decreases future reproductive performance in adult mice; female offspring previously experiencing high temperatures have a significant fitness disadvantage.

Summary: Bumblebee workers exhibit a physiological signature (innate to workers, queen or the colony) corresponding to colony age with a shift towards a diapause-like profile in late-eclosing workers.

Highlighted Article: A single nanometer difference in the spacing of actin and myosin between two muscles may help account for the muscles’ different locomotor functions.

Summary: Stimulation of NO synthesis due to induction of the gene for iNOS under hyper-ammonia stress plays a significant role in defence against ammonia-induced oxidative stress in magur catfish.