Issues
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Cover image
Cover Image
Cover: A group of albino Xenopus laevis tadpoles jostle each other for access to food lying on the floor of their tank. The tadpoles are nearly transparent, allowing for in vivo visualization of blood vessels, nerves, lungs and more. Phillips et al. (jeb243102) examine the mechanics of air breathing in these tadpoles, taking advantage of their transparency to directly observe the flow of air from the mouth into the lungs. They document air breathing mechanics and lung morphology throughout larval development and find relatively little change as tadpoles transition from bubble sucking to breach breathing. Photo credit: Kurt Schwenk.
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INSIDE JEB
REVIEWS
The physiological cost of colour change: evidence, implications and mitigations
Summary: This Review discusses the energetic cost of colour change and highlights the effects of this cost on animals that change colour rapidly and slowly and how it can be avoided or lessened.
Global change and physiological challenges for fish of the Amazon today and in the near future
Summary: Amazonia is now in crisis owing to climate change and other anthropogenic pressures. High temperature is the most critical of the physiological threats to its unique and diverse fish fauna.
SHORT COMMUNICATION
Fast stretching of skeletal muscle fibres abolishes residual force enhancement
Summary: Residual force enhancement (rFE) is thought to be achieved by stretching an active muscle at any speed. However, experiments indicate that fast stretching eliminates rFE, presumably by preventing strong cross-bridge binding.
METHODS & TECHNIQUES
An accelerometer-derived ballistocardiogram method for detecting heart rate in free-ranging marine mammals
Highlighted Article: Validation of a computational method for extracting heart rate in free-ranging cetaceans from high-resolution accelerometer data using a ballistocardiogram.
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Bivalves maintain repair when faced with chronically repeated mechanical stress
Summary: After 7 months with weekly bouts of mechanical stress, California mussels had repaired shell damage and maintained shell strength; repair was associated with morphological changes but came at a significant cost.
Seasonal changes in membrane structure and excitability in retinal neurons of goldfish (Carassius auratus) under constant environmental conditions
Summary: Neurons isolated from the retina of goldfish held under constant environmental conditions undergo seasonal changes in membrane structure and excitability.
Residual force enhancement is reduced in permeabilized fiber bundles from mdm muscles
Summary: Residual force enhancement is reduced in fiber bundles from mdm mice, supporting a role for titin in residual force enhancement.
Experimental warming during incubation improves cold tolerance of blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) chicks
Summary: Chicks from experimentally heated nests demonstrate greater cold tolerance compared with control chicks when exposed to a series of post-hatch cooling challenges.
Additive and epistatic effects influence spectral tuning in molluscan retinochrome opsin
Summary: Site-directed mutagenesis indicates that spectral tuning in retinochrome is not solely additive but is instead influenced by intra-molecular epistasis.
Honey bees respond to multimodal stimuli following the principle of inverse effectiveness
Summary: Bimodal enhancement during learning and memory tasks in africanized honey bees increases as the stimulus intensity of its unimodal components decreases; this indicates that learning performance depends on the interaction between the intensity of its components and the nature of the sensory modalities involved, supporting the principle of inverse effectiveness.
Cockroaches adjust body and appendages to traverse cluttered large obstacles
Summary: Cockroaches make adjustments to better roll into gaps to traverse cluttered large obstacles.
Locomotion in the pseudoscorpion Chelifer cancroides: forward, backward and upside-down walking in an eight-legged arthropod
Highlighted Article: Pseudoscorpions perform an alternating tetrapod gait during forward and backward locomotion, with consistently higher speeds during backward motion, while no fixed leg coupling occurs during upside-down walking.
The functional basis for variable antipredatory behavioral strategies in the chameleon Chamaeleo calyptratus
Summary: Behavioral antipredator response in chameleons is predicted by both the functional capacity to perform these behaviors and the immediate environmental context for that individual.
The mechanics of air breathing in African clawed frog tadpoles, Xenopus laevis (Anura: Pipidae)
Highlighted Article: Air-breathing mechanics in Xenopus laevis tadpoles change over development as they transition from bubble-sucking to breaching. Differences in breathing mechanics appear to be primarily a consequence of growth, and despite temporal correlations to changes in respiratory physiology, are not linked to changes in lung morphology.
The acute effects of higher versus lower load duration and intensity on morphological and mechanical properties of the healthy Achilles tendon: a randomized crossover trial
Summary: High levels of load duration and intensity have the greatest acute effect on the free Achilles tendon volume and stiffness.
Anna's hummingbird (Calypte anna) physiological response to novel thermal and hypoxic conditions at high elevations
Highlighted Article: Hummingbirds show increased torpor use in response to colder thermal conditions above their elevational range limit but exhibit a decrease in hovering performance in response to lower oxygen conditions.
CORRECTION
Celebrating 100 years of discovery

We are proud to be celebrating 100 years of discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology. Visit our centenary webpage to find out more about how we are marking this historic milestone.
Craig Franklin launches our centenary celebrations

Editor-in-Chief Craig Franklin reflects on 100 years of JEB and looks forward to our centenary celebrations, including a supplementary special issue, a new early-career researcher interview series and the launch of our latest funding initiatives.
Looking back on the first issue of JEB

Journal of Experimental Biology launched in 1923 as The British Journal of Experimental Biology. As we celebrate our centenary, we look back at that first issue and the zoologists publishing their work in the new journal.
Webinar: Increasing the visibility and impact of your research
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Would you like to increase the visibility and impact of your research and raise your profile internationally? If so, register for the very practical webinar we are running in association with HUBS on 23 February 2023.
Biology Communication Workshop: Engaging the world in the excitement of research
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We are delighted to be sponsoring a Biology Communication Workshop for early-career researchers as part of JEB’s centenary celebrations. The workshop focuses on how to effectively communicate your science to other researchers and the public and takes place the day before the CSZ annual meeting, on 14 May 2023. Find out more and apply here.
Mexican fruit flies wave for distraction

Dinesh Rao and colleagues have discovered that Mexican fruit flies vanish in a blur in the eyes of predatory spiders when they wave their wings at the arachnids, buying the flies time to make their escape.