Poaching is a prominent source of ‘hidden hurdles’, cryptic impacts of human activities that may hinder the conservation of animal populations. Estimating poaching mortality is challenging, as the evidence for...
Authors: Luca Corlatti, Ana Sanz-Aguilar, Giacomo Tavecchia, Alessandro Gugiatti and Luca Pedrotti
Mucus and mucus glands are important features of the amphibian cutis. In tree frogs, the mucus glands and their secretions are crucial components of the adhesive digital pads of these animals. Despite a variet...
Authors: Julian K.A. Langowski, Saranshu Singla, Alex Nyarko, Henk Schipper, Frank T. van den Berg, Sukhmanjot Kaur, Henry C. Astley, Sander W.S. Gussekloo, Ali Dhinojwala and Johan L. van Leeuwen
Immunohistochemical studies of hearts from the lesser spotted dogfish, Scyliorhinus canicula (Chondrichthyes) revealed that the pan-myosin heavy chain (pan-MyHC) antibody MF20 homogeneously labels all the myocard...
Authors: Miguel A. López-Unzu, Ana Carmen Durán, María Teresa Soto-Navarrete, Valentín Sans-Coma and Borja Fernández
Lizards are excellent models to study the adaptations of the visual system to different scenarios, and surface-dwelling representatives have been relatively well studied. In contrast, very little is known abou...
Authors: Carola A. M. Yovanovich, Michele E. R. Pierotti, Miguel Trefaut Rodrigues and Taran Grant
Onychophorans, commonly known as velvet worms, display a remarkable diversity of reproductive strategies including oviparity, and placentotrophic, lecithotrophic, matrotrophic or combined lecithotrophic/matrot...
Authors: Sandra Treffkorn, Oscar Yesid Hernández-Lagos and Georg Mayer
Marine and intertidal organisms face the rhythmic environmental changes induced by tides. The large amplitude of spring tides that occur around full and new moon may threaten nests of ground-nesting birds. The...
Authors: Silvia Plaschke, Martin Bulla, Medardo Cruz-López, Salvador Gómez del Ángel and Clemens Küpper
Researchers often document wildlife surveys using images. These images contain data that can be used to understand alterative research objectives, even years after they were originally captured. We have develo...
Authors: Caitlin E. Black, Hannah S. Mumby and Michelle D. Henley
Animal vocal signals encode very important information for communication during which the importance of temporal and spectral characteristics of vocalizations is always asymmetrical and species-specific. Howev...
Authors: Yanzhu Fan, Xizi Yue, Jing Yang, Jiangyan Shen, Di Shen, Yezhong Tang and Guangzhan Fang
In mammals, the hibernating state is characterized by biochemical adjustments, which include metabolic rate depression and a shift in the primary fuel oxidized from carbohydrates to lipids. A number of studies...
Authors: Blandine Chazarin, Kenneth B. Storey, Anna Ziemianin, Stéphanie Chanon, Marine Plumel, Isabelle Chery, Christine Durand, Alina L. Evans, Jon M. Arnemo, Andreas Zedrosser, Jon E. Swenson, Guillemette Gauquelin-Koch, Chantal Simon, Stephane Blanc, Etienne Lefai and Fabrice Bertile
Shortening photoperiod triggers seasonal adjustments like cessation of reproduction, molting and heterothermy. However there is a considerable among-individual variation in photoresponsiveness within one popul...
Authors: Anna S. Przybylska, Michał S. Wojciechowski and Małgorzata Jefimow
Intermittent fasting (IF) is receiving increasing attention as an alternative to continuous restriction of calories because of its benefits in aging-related disease prevention and lifespan extension. However, ...
Entoprocta affinities within Lophotrochozoa remain unclear. In different studies, entoprocts are considered to be related to different groups, including Cycliophora, Bryozoa, Annelida, and Mollusca. The use of...
Authors: Anastasia O. Borisanova, Vladimir V. Malakhov and Elena N. Temereva
The consumption of conspecific young by adult individuals is a common phenomenon across various animal taxa. Possible adaptive benefits of such behaviour include the acquisition of nutrients, decreased competi...
Authors: Sandra Spring, Marion Lehner, Ludwig Huber and Eva Ringler
Effective communication between sexual partners is essential for successful reproduction. Avian parents with biparental incubation need to know how to negotiate, when and who will incubate, and how to harmoniz...
Authors: Martin Sládeček, Eva Vozabulová, Kateřina Brynychová and Miroslav E. Šálek
Recent phylogenomic analyses congruently reveal a basal clade which consists of Oweniidae and Mageloniidae as sister group to the remaining Annelida. These results indicate that the last common ancestor of Ann...
Authors: Patrick Beckers, Conrad Helm, Günter Purschke, Katrine Worsaae, Pat Hutchings and Thomas Bartolomaeus
Previous analyses of factors influencing footfall timings and gait selection in quadrupeds have focused on the implications for energetic cost or gait mechanics separately. Here we present a model for symmetri...
Authors: Charlotte Elizabeth Miller, Laura Elizabeth Johnson, Henry Pinkard, Pierre Lemelin and Daniel Schmitt
The fitness of holometabolous insects depends largely on resources acquired at the larval stage. Larval density is an important factor modulating larval resource-acquisition, influencing adult survival, reprod...
Authors: Juliano Morimoto, Binh Nguyen, Hue Dinh, Anh The Than, Phillip W. Taylor and Fleur Ponton
The relationships among energy metabolic levels, behavioral and other physiological traits help to determine the trade-off of energy allocation between different traits and the evolution of life-history driven...
Authors: Wenyi Zhang, Cuijuan Niu, Yukun Liu and Kenneth B. Storey
The Australian dingo continues to cause debate amongst Aboriginal people, pastoralists, scientists and the government in Australia. A lingering controversy is whether the dingo has been tamed and has now rever...
Authors: J. William O. Ballard and Laura A. B. Wilson
Habitat quality is one main trigger for the persistence of butterflies. The effects of the influencing biotic and abiotic factors may be enhanced by the challenging conditions in high-alpine environments. To b...
Authors: Stefan Ehl, Niklas Böhm, Manuel Wörner, László Rákosy and Thomas Schmitt
Only a few studies have examined the visual systems of Amblypygi (whip spiders) until now. To get new insights suitable for phylogenetic analysis we studied the axonal trajectories and neuropil architecture of...
Upon the detection of imminent peril, pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum) often drop off their host plant. Dropping in response to insect enemies is intermittent in nature, but when a mammalian herbivore feeds on th...
Parental effects may produce adaptive or maladaptive plasticity that either facilitates persistence or increases the extinction risk of species and populations in a changing climate. However, empirical evidenc...
Authors: Bao-Jun Sun, Yang Wang, Yong Wang, Hong-Liang Lu and Wei-Guo Du
Trait based functional and community ecology is en vogue. Most studies, however, ignore phenotypical diversity by characterizing entire species considering only trait means rather than their variability. Phenotyp...
Authors: Adrian Brückner, Romina Schuster, Katja Wehner and Michael Heethoff
Among bryozoans, cyclostome anatomy is the least studied by modern methods. New data on the nervous system fill the gap in our knowledge and make morphological analysis much more fruitful to resolve some quest...
In the general model of sex chromosome evolution for diploid dioecious organisms, the Y (or W) chromosome is derived, while the homogametic sex presumably represents the ancestral condition. However, in the fr...
Amphibian defence against predators and microorganisms is directly related to cutaneous glands that produce a huge number of different toxins. These glands are distributed throughout the body but can form accu...
Authors: Pedro Luiz Mailho-Fontana, Marta Maria Antoniazzi, Juliana Mozer Sciani, Daniel Carvalho Pimenta, Katia Cristina Barbaro and Carlos Jared
It is widely assumed that variation in fitness components has a physiological basis that might underlie selection on trade-offs, but the mechanisms driving decreased survival and future fecundity remain elusiv...
Authors: Melinda A. Fowler, Mélissa Paquet, Véronique Legault, Alan A. Cohen and Tony D. Williams
The mechanism that determines the specific body size of an animal is a fundamental biological question that remains largely unanswered. This aspect is now beginning to be understood in insect models, particula...
A number of shelled and shell-less gastropods are known to use multiple defensive mechanisms, including internally generated or externally obtained biochemically active compounds and structures. Within Nudiple...
Authors: Jessica A. Goodheart, Sabrina Bleidißel, Dorothee Schillo, Ellen E. Strong, Daniel L. Ayres, Angelika Preisfeld, Allen G. Collins, Michael P. Cummings and Heike Wägele
Species delineation is particularly challenging in taxa with substantial intra-specific variation. In systematic studies of fishes, meristics and linear measurements that describe shape are often used to delin...
Authors: Maarten Van Steenberge, Joost André Maria Raeymaekers, Pascal István Hablützel, Maarten Pieterjan Maria Vanhove, Stephan Koblmüller and Jos Snoeks
For brown bears (Ursus arctos), hibernation is a critical part of the annual life cycle because energy savings during hibernation can be crucial for overwintering, and females give birth to cubs at that time. For...
Authors: M M Delgado, G Tikhonov, E Meyke, M Babushkin, T Bespalova, S Bondarchuk, A Esengeldenova, I Fedchenko, Y Kalinkin, A Knorre, G Kosenkov, V Kozsheechkin, A Kuznetsov, E Larin, D Mirsaitov, I Prokosheva…
Birds, across their annual cycle, progress through sequences of life-history stages such as reproduction and molt. The mechanisms that control annual avian itineraries involve endocrine responses triggered by ...
Authors: Rene Quispe, Elizabeth Yohannes and Manfred Gahr
The facial musculature is a remarkable anatomical complex involved in vital activities of fishes, such as food capture and gill ventilation. The evolution of the facial muscles is largely unknown in most major...
Density estimation is a key issue in wildlife management but is particularly challenging and labour-intensive for elusive species. Recently developed approaches based on remotely collected data and capture-rec...
Authors: Luca Mattioli, Antonio Canu, Daniela Passilongo, Massimo Scandura and Marco Apollonio
Interspecies variation in avian egg shape and size is understandable in terms of adaptation, allometry and phylogeny. Within-species variation in egg properties influences offspring fitness and can be explaine...
Authors: Mirosława Bańbura, Michał Glądalski, Adam Kaliński, Marcin Markowski, Joanna Skwarska, Jarosław Wawrzyniak, Piotr Zieliński and Jerzy Bańbura
As a small artiodactyl, the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus L.) is characterized by biological plasticity and great adaptability demonstrated by their survival under a wide variety of environmental conditions. In o...
Authors: Svetlana Milošević-Zlatanović, Tanja Vukov, Srđan Stamenković, Marija Jovanović and Nataša Tomašević Kolarov
A median, segmented, annelid nerve cord has repeatedly been compared to the arthropod and vertebrate nerve cords and became the most used textbook representation of the annelid nervous system. Recent phylogeno...
Authors: Conrad Helm, Patrick Beckers, Thomas Bartolomaeus, Stephan H. Drukewitz, Ioannis Kourtesis, Anne Weigert, Günter Purschke, Katrine Worsaae, Torsten H. Struck and Christoph Bleidorn
Throughout life, physiological homeostasis is challenged and the capacity to cope with such challenges declines with increasing age. In many species, sex differences exist in life expectancy. Sex-specific diff...
Authors: V. Behringer, J. M. G. Stevens, T. Deschner, R. Sonnweber and G. Hohmann
Immature stages of many animals can forage and feed on their own, whereas others depend on their parents’ assistance to obtain or process food. But how does such dependency evolve, and which offspring and pare...
Authors: Alexandra Capodeanu-Nägler, Madlen A. Prang, Stephen T. Trumbo, Heiko Vogel, Anne-Katrin Eggert, Scott K. Sakaluk and Sandra Steiger
Noise pollution is one of the leading environmental health risks for humans, linked to a myriad of stress-related health problems. Yet little is known about the long-term effects of noise on the health and fit...
Authors: A. M. Dorado-Correa, S.A. Zollinger, B. Heidinger and H. Brumm
Tree frogs have the remarkable ability to attach to smooth, rough, dry, and wet surfaces using their versatile toe pads. Tree frog attachment involves the secretion of mucus into the pad-substrate gap, requiri...
Authors: Julian K. A. Langowski, Dimitra Dodou, Marleen Kamperman and Johan L. van Leeuwen
Macroinvertebrates such as non-biting midges (Chironomidae: Diptera) are important components of freshwater ecosystems. However, they are often neglected in biodiversity and conservation research because inver...
Authors: Bilgenur Baloğlu, Esther Clews and Rudolf Meier
While thousands of ant species are arboreal, very few are able to chew and tunnel through living wood. Ants of the genus Melissotarsus (subfamily Myrmicinae) inhabit tunnel systems excavated under the bark of liv...
Authors: Adam Khalife, Roberto A. Keller, Johan Billen, Francisco Hita Garcia, Evan P. Economo and Christian Peeters
The neuromuscular junction is the chemical synapse where motor neurons communicate with skeletal muscle fibers. Whereas vertebrates and many invertebrates use acetylcholine as transmitter at the neuromuscular ...
Authors: Hendrik Langeloh, Hannah Wasser, Nicole Richter, Gerd Bicker and Michael Stern
The life history stages of brachyuran crustaceans include pelagic larvae of the Zoea type which grow by a series of moults from one instar to the next. Zoeae actively feed and possess a wide range of organ sys...
Authors: Franziska Spitzner, Rebecca Meth, Christina Krüger, Emanuel Nischik, Stefan Eiler, Andy Sombke, Gabriela Torres and Steffen Harzsch
Enteropneusts are benthic marine invertebrates that belong to the deuterostome phylum Hemichordata. The two main clades of enteropneusts are defined by differences in early life history strategies. In the Spen...
Authors: Paul Gonzalez, Jeffrey Z. Jiang and Christopher J. Lowe
Prenatal antibody transfer is an immune-mediated maternal effect by which females can shape postnatal offspring resistance to pathogens and parasites. Maternal antibodies passed on to offspring provide primary...
Authors: Rafał Martyka, Ewa B. Śliwińska, Mirosław Martyka, Mariusz Cichoń and Piotr Tryjanowski
Myoanatomical studies of adult bryozoans employing fluorescent staining and confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) have been chiefly conducted on freshwater bryozoans. The diversity of muscular systems in t...
Whether the great morphological disparity of domesticated forms is the result of uniformly higher evolutionary rates compared to the wild populations is debated. We provide new data on changes of skull dimensi...
Authors: Madeleine Geiger and Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra
