Chiandetti, Cinzia Dissegna, Andrea Rogers, Lesley J Turatto, Massimo
Published in
Biology letters
Hemispheric specialization influences stimulus processing and behavioural control, affecting responses to relevant stimuli. However, most sensory input is irrelevant and must be filtered out to prevent interference with task-relevant behaviour, a process known as habituation. Despite habituation's vital role, little is known about hemispheric speci...
Pinzoni, Livia Locatello, Lisa Gasparini, Clelia Rasotto, Maria Berica
Published in
Biology letters
Growing evidence shows that non-gametic components released by both males and females can significantly drive sperm competition outcomes. Seminal fluid (SF) was shown to influence paternity success by affecting rival males' sperm performance, and, in some species with male alternative reproductive tactics, to selectively decrease the fertilization ...
Togashi, Tatsuya Parker, Geoff A Horinouchi, Yusuke
Published in
Biology letters
In eukaryotes, a fundamental phenomenon underlying sexual selection is the evolution of gamete size dimorphism between the sexes (anisogamy) from an ancestral gametic system with gametes of the same size in both mating types (isogamy). The nuclear-cytoplasmic conflict hypothesis has been one of the major theoretical hypotheses for the evolution of ...
Halsey, Lewis G Careau, Vincent Ainslie, Philip N Alemán-Mateo, Heliodoro Andersen, Lene F Anderson, Liam J Arab, Leonore Baddou, Issad Bandini, Linda Bedu-Addo, Kweku
...
Published in
Biology letters
There is considerably greater variation in metabolic rates between men than between women, in terms of basal, activity and total (daily) energy expenditure (EE). One possible explanation is that EE is associated with male sexual characteristics (which are known to vary more than other traits) such as musculature and athletic capacity. Such traits m...
Kurz, Max J Hutchinson, John R
Published in
Biology letters
Elephants are atypical of most quadrupeds in that they maintain the same lateral sequence footfall pattern across all locomotor speeds. It has been speculated that the preservation of the footfall patterns is necessary to maintain a statically stable support polygon. This should be a particularly important constraint in large, relatively slow anima...
Valenzuela-Toro, Ana M Mehta, Rita Pyenson, Nicholas D Costa, Daniel P Koch, Paul L
Published in
Biology letters
Body size and feeding morphology influence how animals partition themselves within communities. We tested the relationships among sex, body size, skull morphology and foraging in sympatric otariids (eared seals) from the eastern North Pacific Ocean, the most diverse otariid community in the world. We recorded skull measurements and stable carbon (δ...
Harmon, Emily A Evans, Boyce Pfennig, David W
Published in
Biology letters
Developmental plasticity can occur at any life stage, but plasticity that acts early in development may give individuals a competitive edge later in life. Here, we asked if early (pre-feeding) exposure to a nutrient-rich resource impacts hatchling morphology in Mexican spadefoot toad tadpoles, Spea multiplicata. A distinctive carnivore morph can be...
Diaz, Jessica Redford, Kent H Reese, Aspen T
Published in
Biology letters
Animals in captive and urban environments encounter evolutionarily novel conditions shaped by humans, such as altered diets, exposure to human-associated bacteria, and, potentially, medical interventions. Captive and urban environments have been demonstrated to affect gut microbial composition and diversity independently but have not yet been studi...
Santiago, Ma Francesca M King, Kayla C Drew, Georgia C
Published in
Biology letters
Agricultural crops infected with vector-borne pathogens can suffer severe negative consequences, but the extent to which phytopathogens affect the fitness of their vector hosts remains unclear. Evolutionary theory predicts that selection on vector-borne pathogens will favour low virulence or mutualistic phenotypes in the vector, traits facilitating...
Sosiak, Christine E Borowiec, Marek L Barden, Phillip
Published in
Biology letters
Among social insects, army ants are exceptional in their voracious coordinated predation, nomadic life history and highly specialized wingless queens: the synthesis of these remarkable traits is referred to as the army ant syndrome. Despite molecular evidence that the army ant syndrome evolved twice during the mid-Cenozoic, once in the Neotropics a...
