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
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 of vertebrate locomotion

Auke J. Ijspeert and Monica A. Daley provide an overview of key knowledge on feedback and feedforward control gained from comparative vertebrate experiments 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.