Issues

Summary: Understanding the biology of animals that experience natural periods of disuse but suffer little musculoskeletal atrophy may reveal novel regulatory factors and lead to new therapeutics.

Summary: This Review examines the volume and osmotic concentration of the hemolymph in aquatic, terrestrial and gorging insects. Solute–volume plots illustrate the particular challenges to the hemolymph and the physiological responses.

Summary: Nitrogen limits coral productivity in tropical waters; diazotrophs represent an important source of nitrogen for scleractinian corals.

Summary: Transcriptomics reveals that summer emergence timing of flies is regulated during winter, while initial transcriptional responses to post-winter warming are largely suppressed.

Highlighted Article: Water balance of birds fasting without water is maintained mainly by elevated fat catabolism, which generates 6 times more metabolic water compared with that for birds with access to water.

Summary: A pentameric ligand-gated ion channel (pLGIC) regulates fluid secretion in Drosophila Malpighian (renal) tubules by modulating chloride transport in response to luminal pH, indicating a novel role for pLGICs beyond neurotransmission.

Summary: Differences in visual acuity, foveal specialization and visual field between Harris's hawks, Parabuteo unicinctus, and black kites, Milvus migrans, may reflect differences in the perceptual demands of their foraging behaviours.

Summary: Despite enclosure of the pelvis in a shell, cryptodire turtles show substantial pelvic movements during walking and swimming that enhance limb excursion and may influence ecological traits of the clade.

Highlighted Article: Marmosets show convergent and divergent kinematic responses to perturbations in support diameter and compliance, suggesting that compliance is a critical – yet understudied – environmental determinant of arboreal locomotor performance.

Summary: After exposure to an acute and near-lethal heat stress, gill from the mussel Geukensia demissa responds immediately with a coordinated time course of changes in protein abundance.

Summary: A novel, accurate and low-cost drone based method for determining position, velocity and acceleration from ranging subjects in field data collection.

Summary: X-ray fluoroscopy of shoulder girdle and forelimb movements in Testudo hermanni identifies kinematic mechanisms that enhance locomotor performance within the inherent framework of structural and physiological constraints of Testudines.

Summary: Three-dimensional reconstructions of bat–insect interactions reveal that prey survive chases by escaping into ‘safety zones’ that flank predators.

Highlighted Article: Endurance flight and supplementation with water-soluble antioxidants both affect the composition of zebra finch eggs; such carry-over effects have implications for wild migratory birds.

Summary: Using Drosophila melanogaster, we show how developmental plasticity of cold tolerance is completely reversible in the adult stage, while adult acclimation in heat tolerance is constrained by developmental temperature.

Summary: Praying mantises modulate stereotypic components of their feeding strike through the flexibility in the coxa–prothorax joint and amount of lunge from the mesothoracic and metathoracic legs.

Summary: Both opening of mitoKATP channels and bioenergetic effects of pharmacological channel modulators protect against hypoxia–reoxygenation stress in fish mitochondria.

Summary: Natural odors vary in composition among objects, which could confound categorization with regard to common meanings. Plasticity in early olfactory processing enables efficient use of the coding space to solve this categorization problem.

Summary: High rates of glucose metabolism in gas glands of Atlantic cod are supported by GLUT1 and HKIb, a hexokinase paralogue that should not bind to mitochondria.