Neonicotinoid pesticides can impair bees' ability to learn and remember information about flowers, critical for effective foraging. Although these effects on cognition may contribute to broader effects on health and performance, to date they have largely ...

How sexual traits are gained and lost in the wild remains an important question in evolutionary biology. Pacific field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) in Hawaii provide an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the factors facilitating evolutionary ...

Brain lateralization, or the specialization of function in the left versus right brain hemispheres, has been found in a variety of lineages in contexts ranging from foraging to social and sexual behaviours, including the recognition of conspecific social ...

Over the past decade, a growing number of publications have claimed to provide evidence for the existence and function of neonatal imitation in rhesus macaques. Here I show that there is in fact no empirical basis for these claims. Studies of the ...

The communicative function of primates' self-directed behaviours like scratching has gained increasing attention in recent years, but their intentional use is still debated. Here, we addressed this issue by exploring the communicative function of ‘loud ...

Fish inhabiting human-dominated ecosystems are prone to altered sensory environments in which they must live and function. Increased turbidity is one such change that they must deal with. We tested whether an increase in water turbidity and the presence ...

Behavioural differences among social groups can arise from differing ecological conditions, genetic predispositions and/or social learning. In the past, social learning has typically been inferred as responsible for the spread of behaviour by the ...

Animals such as bumblebees use chemosensory cues to both locate and evaluate essential resources. Increasingly, it is recognized that microbes can alter the quality of foraged resources and produce metabolites that may act as foraging cues. The distinct ...

Animals use cues to find their food, in microhabitats within their physiological tolerances. Termites build and modify their microhabitat, to transform hostile environments into benign ones, which raises questions about the relative importance of cues. ...

Insects represent the most diverse and functionally important group of flying migratory animals around the globe, yet their small size makes tracking even large migratory species challenging. We attached miniaturized radio transmitters (less than 300 mg) ...

Learning contextual information to form associative memories with stimuli of interest is an important brain function in both human and non-human animals. Intuitively, one would expect that such a sophisticated cognitive skill develops postnatally, as the ...

Dolphin skin has long been an inspiration for research on drag reduction mechanisms due to the presence of skin ridges that could reduce fluid resistance. We gathered in vivo three-dimensional surface data on the skin from five species of odontocetes to ...

The muscles that effect lung ventilation are key to understanding the evolutionary constraints on animal form and function. Here, through electromyography, we demonstrate a newly discovered respiratory function for the iliocostalis muscle in the American ...

Plants have evolved numerous herbivore defences that are resistance- or tolerance-based. Resistance involves physical and chemical traits that deter and/or harm herbivores whereas tolerance minimizes fitness costs of herbivory, often via compensatory ...

Abundance–body mass (N–M) relationships are prominent macroecological patterns and provide an integrated measurement of the structure and energy flow through natural communities. However, little is known about how N–M relationships are constrained by ...

Latitudinal and altitudinal range shifts in response to climate change have been reported for numerous animal species, especially those with high dispersal capacities. In plants, the impact of climate change on species distribution or community ...

Juvenile animals generally disperse from their birthplace to their future breeding territories. In fragmented landscapes, habitat-specialist species must disperse through the anthropogenic matrix where remnant habitats are embedded. Here, we test the ...

Bird pollination systems are dominated by specialist nectarivores, such as hummingbirds in the Americas and sunbirds in Africa. Opportunistic (generalist) avian nectarivores such as orioles, weavers and bulbuls have also been implicated as plant ...

Most flowering plants species rely on insects for pollination, a successful mutualism allowing them to reproduce over wide areas while flower-visitors are rewarded with food. This association is so conspicuous in the case of bees that other groups of ...

As a colonizing species expands its range, individuals at the invasion front experience different evolutionary pressures than do those at the range-core. For example, low densities at the edge of the range mean that males should rarely experience intense ...

Large-scale tissue regeneration has potential consequences for telomere length through increases in cell division and changes in metabolism which increase the potential for oxidative stress damage to telomeres. The effects of regeneration on telomere ...

Invasive placentation with extended pregnancy is a shared derived characteristic unique to eutherian mammals that possess a highly effective system of haemostasis, platelets. These are found in all mammals but no other group of animals. We propose that ...

While research on ocean acidification (OA) impacts on coral reefs has focused on calcification, relatively little is known about effects on coral photosynthesis and respiration, despite these being among the most plastic metabolic processes corals may use ...

The Earth is getting brighter at night, as artificial light at night (ALAN) continues to increase and extend its reach. Despite recent recognition of the damaging impacts of ALAN on terrestrial ecosystems, research on ALAN in marine systems is ...

Understanding how animals forage is a central objective in ecology. Theory suggests that where food is uniformly distributed, Brownian movement ensures the maximum prey encounter rate, but when prey is patchy, the optimal strategy resembles a Lévy walk ...

In insects, odours are coded by the combinatorial activation of ascending pathways, including their third-order representation in mushroom body Kenyon cells. Kenyon cells also receive intersecting input from ascending and mostly dopaminergic reinforcement ...

There has been much recent debate about which method is best for reconstructing the tree of life from morphological datasets. However, little attention has been paid to which characters, if any, are responsible for topological differences between trees ...

The morphology of the early ontogenetic stages of cycad foliage may help resolve the relationships between extinct to extant cycad lineages. However, prior to this study, fossil evidence of cycad seedlings was not known. We describe a compression fossil ...

Phenotypic plasticity—one individual's capacity for phenotypic variation under different environments—is critical for organisms facing fluctuating conditions within their lifetime. North American red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) experience drastic ...

Polymorphisms in a population are expected to increase the growth rate and the stability of the population, leading to the expansion of geographical distribution and mitigation of extinction risk of a species. However, the generality of such ecological ...

Fire is the most frequent disturbance in the Ericaceous Belt (ca 3000–4300 m.a.s.l.), one of the most important plant communities of tropical African mountains. Through resprouting after fire, Erica establishes a positive fire feedback under certain ...