Issues

Summary: Amphibious fishes use a diversity of terrestrial locomotor modes dependent upon body shape, physical constraints and phylogeny.

Summary: Solving a mystery regarding loud displays of trainbearer hummingbirds: high-speed videos unveil that the wings, not the extremely elongated tails in males, are responsible for these sonations.

Summary: Lamprey have novel hyperpolarizing (OFF) retinal bipolar cells receiving purely rod input, unlike gnathostomes from fish to mammals. Retinal organization during evolution may have been more fluid than previously thought.

Summary: The advertisement calls of nesting male plainfin midshipman fish contain information about size and condition of the calling male, which could potentially be used by females in mate choice decisions.

Summary: In juvenile Atlantic salmon, aquaculture-related handling and confinement stress increases investment in seawater-related gene expression as part of a compensatory response to impaired seawater tolerance.

Highlighted Article: Oil droplets are captured by filter feeders at low Reynolds number using thick boundary layers and at high Reynolds number via direct interception.

Highlighted Article: Components of the natural cryoprotectant mixture of an extremely freeze-tolerant insect work in synergy and behave differently during organismal freezing and cryopreservation.

Summary: Walking blowflies apparently choose one of two objects to approach. In model simulations, a fixation scheme combined with random attention replicates this behavior without an explicit decision mechanism.

Summary: Although sexual dimorphism in morphology is common in nature, sex-specific multivariate relationships between morphology and performance in green anole lizards suggest distinct ecological demands in males and females.

Summary: Transcriptional and metabolomic data reveal mechanisms associated with enhanced cold hardiness in ticks exposed to rapid-cold hardening conditions.

Summary: Demonstration of an adaptive mechanism that enables the intrinsic foot muscles to make versatile contributions to whole-body accelerations and decelerations.

Summary: Analysis of feeding by anchored garden eels in a flume shows their unique strategies, modulating dependence on burrows and foraging movements, to enable effective feeding at a wide range of flow speeds.

Summary: Comparison of aquatic and terrestrial athletic performance of an amphibious fish indicates no evidence of a trade-off in locomotor performance, perhaps because they are powered by different subsets of the axial musculature (red versus white).

Editor's Choice: Overwintering behaviour among fishes ranges from dormant to lethargic to active. Energy savings come from activity reductions and passive slowing of metabolism by the cold, not from metabolic rate depression.

Summary: Harbour seals are vocal learners that can escape acoustic allometry despite complying with anatomical allometric constraints. Advanced neural control over their vocal organs may allow them to break acoustic allometry.

Highlighted Article: Experimental sugar supplementation in the laboratory and tourist feeding in the wild alter glucose tolerance and metabolism in two species of iguanas.