Issues

Summary: Endothermy allows for a degree of independence from environmental temperatures: does this division limit our ability to predict the impacts of changing temperatures on endotherm performance?

Summary: Warm acclimation not only helps offset the detrimental effects of warming but also could improve performance under hypoxia. Therefore, acclimation is important in maintaining performance in a warmer, hypoxic world.

Summary: Poison frogs rapidly accumulate toxins, which changes the abundance of proteins involved in the immune system and small molecule binding and metabolism across tissues.

Summary: Epicatechin causes a decrease in activity of the cerebral giant cell and increases the persistence of long-term memory formed by conditioned taste aversion in Lymnaea, possibly via a GABAergic mechanism.

Summary: The latency of escape responses of the Pacific spiny dogfish to a predator threat is at least 3 times slower than that of any other teleost tested, supporting the hypothesis that the absence of Mauthner cells in the Pacific spiny dogfish and other elasmobranchs may be associated with longer latencies when escaping from a threat.

Summary: The human walk–run transition does not minimize energetic cost at moderate inclines, but does on steeper inclines (15 deg).

Highlighted Article: Evaluation of the effect of motion parallax on visual size perception in pigeons, using self-generated parallax stimuli, revealed that pigeons use motion parallax depth cues caused by head movements to modulate motor control.

Summary: Changes in body composition, activity and corticosterone during a captive experiment demonstrate that a nomadic avian migrant is not sensitive to changes in food availability, but rather escapes low-resource areas.

Summary: Whip spiders, which navigate at night, can rely on a multisensory, configural representation to recognize their home refuge.

Summary: The rapid expulsion of a significant proportion of the symbiont population by the coral host during cooling conditions is an acclimation mechanism to avoid oxidative stress and severe bleaching.

Summary: Migrating birds may establish their star compass in spring of the year following their first autumn migration or later.

Summary: Immunity induced in 10-day-old workers that emerged and lived under hive conditions is stronger in winter bees than in summer bees. Immune stimuli decreased the production of the longevity marker vitellogenin.

Summary: Nurse-age adult worker honeybees regulate their intake of dietary essential amino acids and fat to a ratio of 1:2. Honeybees gain weight when fed diets high in fat.

Highlighted Article:Drosophila experimentally deprived of their gut microbiome display changes in learning and memory, and in the duration of sleep under standard conditions and following sleep deprivation.

Summary: Two-year exposure of Tanner crabs to reduced-pH seawater resulted in exoskeletal alterations, including thinning, erosion, diminished claw hardness and, in the carapace, a shift in the phase of CaCO₃.

Summary: Solitary bees can show innovative behaviours to solve new problems; this propensity to innovate was uncorrelated with learning capacity, but increased with exploration, boldness and activity.

Summary: During adaptation to fresh water, unrelated crustacean taxa have evolved contrasting osmoregulatory strategies: the crab Dilocarcinus pagei relies on cellular isosmoticity while the shrimp Macrobrachium jelskii regulates gill ion transporter transcription.

Summary: Phenotypic flexibility that is fast but not too fast: modulation of intestinal peptidase to match altered dietary protein level in nestling house sparrows involves parallel change in aminopeptidase-N activity and mRNA.

Summary: Significant changes occur in the swimming kinematics of the copepod Acartia tonsa in response to small-scale, dissipative eddies that are encountered in turbulent environments, suggesting the swimming behavior response to the eddies themselves may be driving the biological and ecological effects of turbulence.

Summary: The human lower limb muscles have the capacity to adapt their function to satisfy the mechanical demands of the task, even during highly constrained, reciprocal tasks such as cycling.