Issues

Summary: During the last two decades, Hans-Otto Pörtner has steered climate change policy as a co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II. He tells us about the experience in this Perspective.

Summary: This Commentary considers the contribution of osmoregulatory ability to invasive potential. Species that have evolved in waters of variable salt content are more competent in invading other water bodies.

Summary: The desert ant Cataglyphis fortis is adapted to the rather featureless saltpans of Tunisia. However, when facing artificially complex environments, the ants exhibit navigational strategies that are surprisingly similar to those of ants that evolved within complex habitats.

Summary: A standardized sets of lengths and speeds proposed for use in the calculation of Reynolds numbers in aquatic animal locomotion to enable confident utilization of data from different sources.

Summary: When startled, fruit flies rapidly move against gravity. This natural response can be exploited to learn how a disease affects movement. An improved method is introduced to study this behavior.

Summary: Common approaches for scaling muscle forces in skull finite element models might not always offer reliable results for all hypotheses: a framework for selecting the appropriate method is provided.

Summary: The dynamic endocast method uses XROMM animations to measure volume change precisely and accurately, with a bias towards underestimating volume change, indicating that these measurements are conservative.

Summary: A model shows how stripes and random contrasts interfere with the optics of image formation in flies and explains the evolution of stripes in animals to deflect flying insects.

Summary: Caribbean coral species may shift their metabolism to tolerate deoxygenation.

Summary: An in-depth analysis of a large-scale dataset of male cricket calling songs, utilizing a novel tool for semi-automated detection of temporal characteristics, reveals that illumination conditions affect calling-song properties.

Highlighted Article: Migrating sea lamprey appear to use a novel mechanism, hydrostatic pressure-guided rheotaxis, to follow river thalwegs and achieve safe and efficient upstream passage through shallow coastal rivers.

Summary: A positive nutritional state enhances sex pheromone detection through juvenile hormone actions on the peripheral actors of the pheromone system in a male moth.

Summary: A meta-analysis of the effect of substrate moisture on the phenotype of oviparous reptiles found a small effect across most traits, but a significant effect on body size.

Editors' choice: Modulations in heat dissipation areas contribute to thermoregulation in doves exposed to external thermal regimes and after flight exercise; caution is warranted when inferring core temperature from skin-level or external measures.

Highlighted Article: Novel insights into reptilian chemoreceptors, identifying and characterizing three functional chemosensory areas in rattlesnakes and expanding our understanding of vertebrate respiratory and cardiovascular control mechanisms.

Summary: Exposing Fundulus heteroclitus to a sub-optimal temperature during development reduces hypoxia tolerance but increases hif1α expression in juvenile fish and has no effect on thermal tolerance.