Issues

Summary: We describe how a highly conserved insect brain region may play a general role in a wide variety of insect orientation behaviours.

Summary: Dry sandy environments present challenges to animal locomotion, but are also amenable to several useful experimental and theoretical methods, which can generate uncommonly rich insights into animal locomotion.

Highlighted Article: When it is hot outside, a possum can save water and avoid dangerous levels of dehydration by letting its body temperature rise with the heat.

Summary: The acoustic startle reflex is conserved in echolocating toothed whales and should be considered when predicting marine mammal responses to human-generated underwater noise.

Summary: Intracellular pH measurements in vivo in ion-transporting cells of zebrafish larvae reveal the roles of ion-transport-related proteins in intracellular acid–base regulation.

Editors' Choice: An extremely small mammal, Mus mattheyi, exhibits lower cellular oxygen consumption and higher mitochondrial efficiency than predicted from allometric trends, generating more cellular energy per oxygen molecule to ensure its homeostasis.

Summary: The euryhaline fish Krytolebias marmoratus likely experiences highest fitness at low salinities, and salinity microhabitats expose behavioral variation among individuals, upon which selection can act.

Summary: Striped bass show a significantly repeatable increase in hypoxia tolerance after repeated exposures, which is largely unrelated to an individual's oxygen consumption while swimming in either hypoxia or normoxia.

Summary: Evolved changes in the control and pattern of breathing in high-altitude deer mice arise in early ontogeny during the developmental transition to endothermy.

Summary: California sea lion diving heart rate is influenced by exercise and relative lung volume.

Summary: An increased blood-oxygen carrying capacity provides high-altitude ducks in the Andes with a greater reserve for O₂ delivery in hypoxia.

Summary: 3D kinematics and morphological analysis reveal that the paedomorphic salamander Siren intermedia uses complex 3D chewing, suggesting that such mechanisms might have evolved early in the tetrapod evolution.

Summary: Tadpoles suck bubbles from the water's surface to breathe air, but gray tree frog tadpoles suck two bubbles. Double bubble-sucking prevents mixing of expired and inspired airstreams, increasing respiratory efficiency.

Summary: Compression in cetacean and pinniped airways during hyperbaric diving simulations indicates that gas exchange ceases at deeper depths than expected with rigid airways, potentially increasing susceptibility to decompression sickness.

Summary: Viscous drag of flagella rather than density asymmetry orients the Chlamydomonas cells upwards in gravitaxis.

Summary: Despite variation in nitrogen solubility across 12 diving tetrapods, we found no link to fatty acid pools comprising their lipids; perhaps the structures of intact lipid molecules are the key.

Summary: Exposure to continuous and amplitude-modulated radiofrequency electromagnetic fields induces different effects on olfactory ensheathing cell viability; marker expression level indicates a role in cell self-renewal.

Highlighted Article: Seal-borne acceleration-triggered video cameras showed that, in the mesopelagic zones across the eastern North Pacific, female northern elephant seals feed mainly on fish rather than squid.

Summary: Rescue behavior, in which Cataglyphis cursor ants release entrapped nestmates, is heritable. Heretofore, this behavior has been overlooked in analyses of division of labor in ants.

Summary: Honeybees exposed to the neonicotinoid pesticide thiamethoxam cannot perform a complex learning task. Honeybees exposed to other neonicotinoids such as imidacloprid and clothianidin, can learn this task, but at a slower rate.

Summary: The coiled fibers of cribellate silk threads produced by Psechrus clavis spiders enhance prey capture in webs by increasing thread extensibility.