Life underground often leads to animals having specialized auditory systems to accommodate the constraints of acoustic transmission in tunnels. Despite living underground, naked mole-rats use a highly vocal communication system, implying that they rely on ...

Evolutionary understanding is central to biology. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding and making informed decisions about societal issues such as climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many ...

Strangers routinely cooperate and exchange goods without any knowledge of one another in one-off encounters without recourse to a third party, an interaction that is fundamental to most human societies. However, this act of reciprocal exchange entails the ...

Interactions in social groups can promote behavioural specialization. One way this can happen is when individuals engage in activities with two behavioural options and learn which option to choose. We analyse interactions in groups where individuals learn ...

The presence of migratory birds on islands results in seasonal variation in species richness. These patterns and their geographical correlates within the context of island biogeography theory have not been examined. We used 21 years of bird observations ...

Climate warming has imposed profound impacts on species globally. Understanding the vulnerabilities of species from different latitudinal regions to warming climates is critical for biological conservation. Using five species of Takydromus lizards as a ...

Host density shapes infection risk through two opposing phenomena. First, when infective stages are subdivided among multiple hosts, greater host densities decrease infection risk through ‘safety in numbers’. Hosts, however, represent resources for ...

General evolutionary theory predicts that individuals in low condition should invest less in sexual traits compared to individuals in high condition. Whether this positive association between condition and investment also holds between young (high ...

Culture is an outcome of both the acquisition of knowledge about behaviour through social transmission, and its subsequent production by individuals. Acquisition and production are often discussed or modelled interchangeably, yet to date no study has ...

Nitric oxide (NO) is an ancestral key signalling molecule essential for life and has enormous versatility in biological systems, including cardiovascular homeostasis, neurotransmission and immunity. Although our knowledge of NO synthases (Nos), the ...

Microsatellites have been a workhorse of evolutionary genetic studies for decades and are still commonly in use for estimating signatures of genetic diversity at the population and species level across a multitude of taxa. Yet, the very high mutation rate ...

Quaternary climate fluctuations can affect speciation in regional biodiversity assembly in two non-mutually exclusive ways: a glacial species pump, where isolation in glacial refugia accelerates allopatric speciation, and adaptive radiation in underused ...

Global warming is associated with an increase in sea surface temperature and its variability. The consequences of evolving in variable, fluctuating environments are explored by a large body of theory: when populations evolve in fluctuating environments ...

Extreme asymmetry of the skull is one of the most distinctive traits that characterizes toothed whales (Odontoceti, Cetacea). The origin and function of cranial asymmetry are connected to the evolution of echolocation, the ability to use high-frequency ...

Comparative analyses of bats indicate that hibernation is associated with increased longevity among species. However, it is not yet known if hibernation affects biological ageing of individuals. Here, we use DNA methylation (DNAm) as an epigenetic ...

Heterokaryosis is a system in which genetically distinct nuclei coexist within the same cytoplasm. While heterokaryosis dominates the life cycle of many fungal species, the transcriptomic changes associated with the transition from homokaryosis to ...

Venoms of predatory marine cone snails are intensely studied because of the biomedical applications of the neuropeptides that they contain, termed conotoxins. Meanwhile some gastropod lineages have independently acquired secretory glands strikingly ...

Dissemination of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes by horizontal gene transfer (HGT) mediated through plasmids is a major global concern. Genomic epidemiology studies have shown varying success of different AMR plasmids during outbreaks, but the ...

The pursuit of prey is vital to the biology of a predator and many aspects of predatory behaviour are well-studied. However, it is unclear how a pursuit can be effective when the prey is faster than a non-cryptic predator. Using kinematic measurements, we ...

A person's focus of attention is conveyed by the direction of their eyes and face, providing a simple visual cue fundamental to social interaction. A growing body of research examines the visual mechanisms that encode the direction of another person's ...