Issues

Summary: Several themes emerge from this Special Issue that seek to break down traditional boundaries between the fields of locomotion biomechanics, energetics and ecology, by integrating laboratory and field studies of animals through novel technologies, across the planet's major ecosystems.

Summary: Birds have highly evolved physiology that may be of interest for future medical innovation, including mechanisms of coping with hypoxia, hyperglycaemia, obesity and age-related sarcopenia, four of the biggest human healthcare challenges.

Summary: Fishes actively exploit complex environments to enhance locomotor efficiency, revealing sophisticated strategies to navigate diverse hydrodynamic landscapes and highlighting the need for habitat complexity in conservation.

Summary: Turbulence is ubiquitous, yet we know little about how it affects animal flight costs and decisions. This matters as anthropogenic activity is changing its distribution and magnitude.

Summary: Physiology underpins why animals move, so biologging physiological variables in large terrestrial mammals provides mechanistic insights into the drivers and outcomes of animal movements in changing environments.

Summary: We believe that coordinated efforts to combine trait and tracking databases will accelerate global ecological and evolutionary insights and inform conservation and management decisions in our changing world.

Summary: Progress in the study of avian flight will accelerate by combining observations for generating alternative hypotheses with directly competing those hypotheses through experiments and analysis.

Summary: The largest whales use a unique lunge-feeding mechanism to capture schooling prey such as fish or krill. Such extreme predator–prey interactions have important energetic and ecological consequences throughout the oceans.

Summary: Studying energetics in the context of the annual cycle of migratory animals can provide new perspectives on the relative costs of locomotion.

Summary: Complementary approaches and advancing technologies in laboratory and field-based research are poised to advance our understanding of the energetics and ecology of fish biomechanics in the years to come.

Summary: In this Review, we focus on historical and emerging research investigating the principle of energy optimization and how it shapes human locomotor mechanics and behaviour.

Summary: Gelatinous zooplankton dominate animal biomass in the ocean, yet we know little about their movement patterns and life histories. Here, we discuss ways to resolve this issue.

Summary: A review of the latest multidisciplinary research on human locomotion on ice, snow and mountains, and in body armour.

Summary: This Review considers how muscle energetics knowledge is integrated into biomechanical models and how this might be improved to better predict how changing locomotion requirements impacts metabolic energy rates.

Summary: In this Review, I discuss the current knowledge about two fundamental biomechanical relationships used to analyse animal flight and migration.

Summary: We propose a set of lab and field experiments to further investigate adhesively assisted gecko locomotion, which is controlled by a hierarchical system including muscles, vascular tissue, tendons and hair-like adhesive structures.

Summary: The energy cost of locomotion can increase total energy expenditure over short time periods, but often leads to trade-offs in other physiological tasks over longer timescales.