Issues
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Cover image
Cover Image
Cover: Red-eyed treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) embryo hatching. These frogs attach their eggs to plants over neotropical rainforest ponds. The embryos can hatch rapidly, up to 30% prematurely, to flee from predators such as egg-eating snakes, escaping to the water below. Cohen et al. (pp. 1875-1883) describe the hatching mechanism that enables embryos under attack to exit their egg capsule in seconds. The image shows an embryo and its egg capsule from three frames of high-speed (1000 Hz) video, spanning 239 ms. Karen Warkentin and Marc Seid recorded the video at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama.
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INSIDE JEB
NEWS
REVIEW
Using light to tell the time of day: sensory coding in the mammalian circadian visual network
Summary: Accurately predicting daily changes in the environment is critical for health and survival. Mammals use surprisingly sophisticated sensory processing mechanisms to achieve this task.
SHORT COMMUNICATIONS
Echo-acoustic flow affects flight in bats
Summary: Sensory flow is a ubiquitous principle for flight guidance, independent of the fundamentally different peripheral representation of flow across the senses of vision and echolocation.
Odor-induced cAMP production in Drosophila melanogaster olfactory sensory neurons
Summary: Odor stimulation induces cAMP production in Drosophila melanogaster olfactory sensory neurons via a process requiring a functional odorant receptor complex.
Skating by: low energetic costs of swimming in a batoid fish
Summary: The little skate exhibits decreasing mass-adjusted swimming metabolic rates with increasing speed, which are the lowest values among elasmobranchs. However, its cost of transport is one of the highest measured for fishes.
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Mechanistic underpinnings of dehydration stress in the American dog tick revealed through RNA-Seq and metabolomics
Highlighted Article: Ticks employ a suite of molecular and biochemical mechanisms to survive dehydration stress; strategies include limiting damage and maximizing recovery when conditions allow.
Haematophagy is costly: respiratory patterns and metabolism during feeding in Rhodnius prolixus
Summary: Feeding on blood is not only a dangerous task but also a costly activity. Rhodnius prolixus increases its metabolic rate 17-fold and its respiratory pattern changes during blood sucking.
Effect of magnetic pulses on Caribbean spiny lobsters: implications for magnetoreception
Summary: Exposure to a strong magnetic pulse altered the orientation behavior of Caribbean spiny lobsters, a finding consistent with the hypothesis that lobsters have magnetoreceptors based on the magnetic mineral magnetite.
The extraordinary joint material of an articulated coralline alga. I. Mechanical characterization of a key adaptation
Highlighted Article: Joints give otherwise rigid coralline algae the flexibility needed to survive in the surf zone; the viscoelastic nature of joint tissue enhances this structural innovation.
The extraordinary joint material of an articulated coralline alga. II. Modeling the structural basis of its mechanical properties
Highlighted Article: By matching cell wall structures to components of a conceptual model, we successfully predict the performance of coralline algal joints, thereby connecting mechanism across scales from molecular architecture to organismal function.
Manakins can produce iridescent and bright feather colours without melanosomes
Summary: Feathers of two species of Lepidothrix manakin produce iridescence on a pale-coloured background using an inverse opal-like matrix of air and keratin.
By land or by sea: a modified C-start motor pattern drives the terrestrial tail-flip
Summary: The mangrove rivulus is an amphibious fish that uses a modified C-start escape response motor pattern to drive its terrestrial tail-flip behavior.
The influence of nasal airflow on respiratory and olfactory epithelial distribution in felids
Summary: Olfactory and non-sensory epithelia in the nose tend to be located in the path of olfactory and respiratory airflow, respectively. Some ethmoturbinals are shown to function in respiration in short-snouted felids.
How embryos escape from danger: the mechanism of rapid, plastic hatching in red-eyed treefrogs
Highlighted Article: Red-eyed treefrog embryos rapidly release hatching enzyme from localized gland cells, then behaviorally exit their capsule in seconds to escape predator attacks. This represents a novel hatching mechanism in frogs.
Modelling colour constancy in fish: implications for vision and signalling in water
Summary: Models of light propagation in water and visual mechanisms show how changes in depth and distance alter visible spectra, and predict the consequences for fish colour vision and colour signals.
The speed and metabolic cost of digesting a blood meal depends on temperature in a major disease vector
Summary: Respirometry reveals that higher environmental temperatures reduce the metabolic costs of digestion but hasten starvation, and behavioral measurements show that tsetse flies switch between thermal optima throughout feeding cycles.
Physiological and microbial adjustments to diet quality permit facultative herbivory in an omnivorous lizard
Summary:The digestive system and gut microbiota of lizards are highly responsive to diet, and thus intrinsic physiological limitations may not limit the evolution of herbivory in lizards.
Honest signaling in domestic piglets (Sus scrofa domesticus): vocal allometry and the information content of grunt calls
Summary: Longitudinal investigation of acoustic allometry in domestic piglets indicates that grunt formant frequencies allow conspecifics to assess a signaler's body size.
Aerobic scope increases throughout an ecologically relevant temperature range in coho salmon
Summary: Coho salmon do not conform to existing predictions about the temperature dependence of aerobic scope in Pacific salmon.
New funding schemes for junior faculty staff

In celebration of our 100th anniversary, JEB has launched two new grants to support junior faculty staff working in animal comparative physiology and biomechanics who are within five years of setting up their first lab/research group. Check out our ECR Visiting Fellowships and Research Partnership Kickstart Travel Grants.
JEB@100: an interview with Monitoring Editor Stuart Egginton

Stuart Egginton reveals how he overcame the challenges of being a comparative physiologist in a medical school and how he would tell his younger self to trust his instincts when pursuing new ideas.
Travelling Fellowships from JEB

Our Travelling Fellowships offer up to £3,000 to graduate students and post-doctoral researchers wishing to make collaborative visits to other laboratories. Next deadline to apply is 27 October 2023
Feedforward and feedback control in the neuromechanics

Auke J. Ijspeert and Monica A. Daley provide an overview of key knowledge gained from comparative vertebrate experiments and insights obtained from neuromechanical simulations and robotic approaches. Read the full Centenary Review Article here.
Light fine-tunes electric fish pulses to keep them in the shade

Weakly electric fish perceive their surroundings through electric chirrups and now Ana Camargo & colleagues have revealed that light fine-tunes the fish's electric pulses to ensure that they remain scheduled beneath the mats of vegetation they use for shelter, avoiding penetrating beams of light that could give them away.