Issues

Summary: Many elegant eye specializations that evolved in response to visual challenges continue to be discovered in arthropods. This Review summarizes exciting solutions that animals have evolved in response to specific visual challenges.

Summary: Examination of the relationship between adhesive performance and substrate use in Tokay geckos (Gekko gecko) reveals that geckos use the substrate that elicits maximal adhesive performance significantly more often than its relative availability.

Summary: Locusts ingesting high carbohydrate diets show a respiratory exchange ratio (RER) above 1 caused by increased CO₂ production resulting from increased de novo lipid synthesis.

Summary: Selectively bred high runner mice had a unique microbiome and early-life Western diet had a long-lasting effect after a substantial washout period; in contrast, early-life exercise had fewer microbiome effects.

Highlighted Article: Hawkmoths compensate for wing damage when tracking flowers in hovering flight: they beat their wings faster and with larger amplitudes, without an impairment in tracking precision.

Summary: Analysis of echinoid larvae during food-induced developmental plasticity reveals that larvae growing at different rates utilize distinct protein metabolic strategies to achieve growth, with the most important difference being mass-specific rates of protein degradation.

Editor's choice: In response to increasing air temperature, southern yellow-billed hornbills display sex-specific thermoregulation correlated with sex differences in microclimates during the breeding season

Summary: Supplementing gull chicks with omega-3 fatty acids in the context of natural deficiency improves their cognitive development, as shown by their ability to fledge earlier by escaping a fence encircling their nest.

Summary: Hawkmoths systematically sweep the surface of artificial flower-like feeders to extract tactile features and learn a more direct strategy to locate the tiny nectary hole at the flower center.

Summary: Red sea bream demonstrated the quick acquisition and long-term retention of angling avoidance learning, and learned angling gear by identifying the fishing line of the angling gear rather than the angling bait.

Highlighted Article: Electric catfish are completely immune not only to their own high-voltage electrical shocks but also to external shocks delivered by a commercial electrofishing device.

Summary: Warm-acclimated Daphnia magna show metabolic rate compensation at lethally high temperatures, escaping a non-sustainable temperature-imposed constraint, a pattern apparent in changes in respiration, feeding, swimming and, partly, mitochondrial membrane potential.

Summary: Fine-scale proteomic profiles of key functional areas of the oyster gill provide a mechanistic explanation for particle selection process in suspension-feeding bivalves.

Summary: Characterization of the olfactory tracking behavior of northern yellow-shouldered bats revealed that the bats can localize an odor reward using klinotaxis and strategic route following, but display fewer head-scanning movements than other mammals.

Summary: Expression of transgenic late embryogenesis abundant proteins in embryos and third instar larvae of Drosophila melanogaster improves survival after exposure to desiccation and hyperosmotic stress.

Summary: Mitochondria of a hypoxia-tolerant bivalve are robust to chronic hypoxia but sensitive to oxygen fluctuations that can impair ATP synthesis efficiency and cause oxidative stress.

Summary: The slow swim speed of sea turtles is regulated by their morphological and physiological features

Summary: Anticipated and acute energetic challenges induce acclimation of the Djungarian hamster small intestine. Seasonal body mass-related adjustments sustain long-term energy balance. Food restriction increases glucose uptake and reduces energy consumption by torpor expression.

Summary: The orientation of migratory monarch butterflies flown in a flight simulator or radio-tracked in the wild was not detectably affected by exposure to field-relevant levels of the neonicotinoid clothianidin during caterpillar development.