Integrative and Comparative Biology

The proportions in the size of the avian egg albumen, yolk, and shell are crucial for understanding bird survival and reproductive success, because their relationships with volume and surface area can affect ecological and life history strategies. Prior studies have focused on the relationship between the albumen and the yolk, but little is known about the scaling relationship between eggshell mass and shape, and the mass of the albumen and the yolk. Toward this end, 691 eggs of six precocial species were examined, and their 2-D egg profiles were photographed and digitized...

The means by which plants and other organisms exist in and respond to dynamic environments to support their thriving as individuals and in communities provide lessons for humans on sustainable and resilient thriving. First examined in my book, Lessons from Plants (Harvard University Press, 2021), I explore herein the following question: "How can plants teach us to be better humans?" I consider how insights gathered from plant physiology, phenotypic plasticity, and other plant growth phenomena can help us improve our lives and our society, with a focus on highlighting academic and scientific environments...

In the context of climate warming, the intensity and frequency of drought occurrences are progressively increasing. However, current research on the impacts of drought on the life history traits and physiological activities of animals rarely encompass soil animals that play crucial roles within soil ecosystems. Therefore, this study focused on a soil nematode species (Acrobeloides sp.) and a model nematode (Caenorhabditis elegans) to investigate whether nematodes adjust the trade-off of their life history traits to confront arid environments, utilizing a Petri dish experiment...

Neophobia, an aversive response to novelty, is a behavior with critical ecological and evolutionary relevance for wild populations because it directly influences animals' ability to adapt to new environments and exploit novel resources. Neophobia has been described in a wide variety of different animal species from arachnids to zebra finches. Because of this widespread prevalence and ecological importance, the number of neophobia studies has continued to increase over time. However, many neophobia studies (as well as many animal behavior studies more generally) suffer from one or more of what we have deemed the "seven deadly sins" of neophobia experimental design...

Coral reef community exhibit high species diversity and a broad range of biological relationships including widespread symbiosis and complex food utilization patterns. In our study, we investigated the symbiotic relationship between the commonly crinoid host Comaster schlegelii and its ophiuroid obligatory symbiont Gymnolophus obscura. Using a combination of fatty acid biomarkers and stable isotopic compositions, we explored differences in their organic matter utilization strategies and nutritional relationships...

Cephalopods are among many marine animals that through some combination of habit and/or habitat have proven difficult to study, especially understanding their trophic positions in marine communities. Stable isotope analyses have provided powerful tools for discovering quantitative aspects about the ecology and food sources of many cephalopod species. Here, we present new gut content and isotopic data (carbon and nitrogen isotopes) from phragmocone-bearing cephalopods (both ectocochleates, as well as those with internal, hard part buoyancy maintenance apparatuses)...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

For most species, the factors that determine geographical range limits are unknown. In mesic-adapted species, populations occurring near the edge of the species' distribution provide ideal study systems in which to investigate what limits distributional ranges. We aimed to identify the abiotic constraints that preclude an east-Australian mesic adapted lizard (Lampropholis delicata) from occupying arid environments. We performed lizard surveys at sites spanning an elevation/aridity gradient (380-1070 m), and measured the prevalence of habitat features (logs, rocks, leaf litter, bare ground, solar radiation) in addition to hourly temperatures in a variety of microhabitats available to lizards...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

In the past 20 years, sequencing technologies have led to easy access to genomic data from non-model organisms in all biological realms. Insect genetic manipulation, however, continues to be a challenge due to various factors, including technical and cost-related issues. Traditional techniques such as microinjection of gene editing vectors into early-stage embryos have been used for arthropod transgenesis and the discovery of CRISPR-Cas technologies allowed for targeted mutagenesis and the creation of knock-outs or knock-ins in arthropods...

Ecydsis, the transformation from juvenile to adult form in insects, is time-consuming and leaves insects vulnerable to predation. For winged insects the process of wing expansion during ecdysis, the unfurling and expanding the wings, is a critical bottleneck in achieving sexual maturity. Internal and external forces play a role in wing expansion. Vigorous abdominal pumping during wing expansion allow insects to pressurize and inflate their wings, filling them with hemolymph. In addition, many insects adopt expansion-specific postures, and if inhibited, do not expand their wings normally, suggesting that external forces such as gravity may play a role...

Glucocorticoids and leptin are two important hormones that regulate metabolic homeostasis by controlling appetite and energy expenditure in adult mammals. Also, glucocorticoids and leptin strongly counter regulate each other such that, chronic stress-induced glucocorticoids upregulate the production of leptin and leptin suppresses glucocorticoid production directly via action on endocrine organs and indirectly via action on food intake. Altered glucocorticoid or leptin levels during development can impair organ development and increase the risk of chronic diseases in adults but there are limited studies depicting the significance of glucocorticoid-leptin interaction during development and it's impact on developmental programming...

Traditional models of oxidative stress predict accumulation of damage caused by reactive oxygen species (ROS) production as highly correlated with aerobic metabolism, a prediction under increasing scrutiny. Here, we repeat sampled female great tits (Parus major) at two opposite levels of energy use during the period of maximum food provisioning to nestlings, once at rest and once during activity. Our results were in contrast to the above prediction, namely significantly higher levels of oxidative damage during rest opposed to active phase...

The genus Agave is an ecological keystone of American deserts and both culturally and economically important in Mexico. Agave is a large genus of about 250 species. The radiation of Agave is marked by an initial adaptation to desert environments and then a secondary diversification of species associated with pollinator groups, such as hummingbirds and nocturnal moths. Phylogenetic analyses place Agave subgenus Manfreda, or the "herbaceous agaves," in a monophyletic clade that likely evolved in part as an adaptation to novel pollination vectors...

Cryptic species complexes represent an important challenge for the adequate characterization of Earth's biodiversity. Oceanic organisms tend to have greater unrecognized cryptic biodiversity since the marine realm was often considered to lack hard barriers to genetic exchange. Here, we tested the effect of several Atlantic and Mediterranean oceanic barriers on 16 morphospecies of oceanic squids of the orders Oegopsida and Bathyteuthida using three mitochondrial and one nuclear molecular marker and five species delimitation methods...

What are the implications of misunderstanding sex as a binary and why is it essential for scientists to incorporate a more expansive view of biological sex in our teaching and research? This roundtable will include many of our symposium speakers, including biologists and intersex advocates, to discuss these topics and visibilize the link between ongoing reification of dyadic sex within scientific communities and the social, political, and medical oppression faced by queer, transgender, and especially intersex communities...

Land-to-sea evolutionary transitions are great transformations where terrestrial amniote clades returned to aquatic environments. These secondarily aquatic amniote clades include charismatic marine mammal and marine reptile groups, as well as countless semi-aquatic forms that modified their terrestrial locomotor anatomy to varying degrees to be suited for swimming via axial and/or appendicular propulsion. The terrestrial ancestors of secondarily aquatic groups would have started off swimming strikingly differently from one another given their evolutionary histories as inferred by the way modern terrestrial amniotes swim...

The symposium "Large-scale biological phenomena arising from small-scale biophysical processes" at the SICB 2023 Annual General Meeting focused on the cross-disciplinary exploration of emergent phenomena in biology. Interactions between cells or organisms at small scales within a system can govern patterns occurring at larger scales in space, time, or biological complexity. This theme recurs in many sub-disciplines of biology, including cell and developmental biology, evolution, and ecology. This symposium, and the associated special issue introduced here, showcases a wide range of cross-disciplinary collaborations among biologists, physicists, and engineers...

Shark skin is a composite of mineralized dermal denticles embedded in an internal collagen fiber network and is sexually dimorphic. Female shark skin is thicker, has greater denticle density and denticle overlap compared to male shark skin, and denticle morphology differs between sexes. The skin behaves with mechanical anisotropy, extending farther when tested along the longitudinal (anteroposterior) axis but increasing in stiffness along the hoop (dorsoventral or circumferential) axis. As a result, shark skin has been hypothesized to function as an exotendon...

The shift of funding organizations to prioritize interdisciplinary work points to the need for workflow models that better accommodate interdisciplinary studies. Most scientists are trained in a specific field and are often unaware of the kind of insights that other disciplines could contribute to solving various problems. In this paper, we present a perspective on how we developed an experimental pipeline between a microscopy and image analysis/bioengineering lab. Specifically, we connected microscopy observations about a putative mechanosensing protein, obscurin, to image analysis techniques that quantify cell changes...