Zoology articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    To reduce parental care, just add water — that's the conclusion of an intriguing investigation into the extent of the motherly and fatherly devotion that different species of frog extend to their offspring.

    • Hanna Kokko
    •  & Michael Jennions

  • Letter |

    How large groups of animals move in a coordinated way has defied complete explanation. Inability to track each member of a flock has hampered understanding of the behavioural rules governing flocks of birds. This, however, has been achieved for a small group of homing pigeons fitted with lightweight GPS loggers. A well–defined hierarchy is revealed — the average position of a pigeon within the flock strongly correlates with is position in the social hierarchy (a kind of airborne pecking order).

    • Máté Nagy
    • , Zsuzsa Ákos
    •  & Tamás Vicsek

  • Letter |

    It is generally accepted that specific neuronal circuits in the brain's cortex drive behavioural execution, but the relationship between the performance of a task and the function of a circuit is unknown. Here, this problem was tackled by using a technique that allows many neurons within the same circuit to be monitored simultaneously. The findings indicate that enhanced correlated activity in specific ensembles of neurons can identify and encode specific behavioural responses while a task is learned.

    • Takaki Komiyama
    • , Takashi R. Sato
    •  & Karel Svoboda

  • Letter |

    Study of two specimens of the feathered dinosaur Similicaudipteryx shows that the morphology of dinosaur feathers changed dramatically as the animals matured. Moreover, the morphology of feathers in dinosaurs was much more varied than one would expect from looking at feathers in modern birds.

    • Xing Xu
    • , Xiaoting Zheng
    •  & Hailu You

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    The genome of the zebra finch — a songbird and a model for studying the vertebrate brain, behaviour and evolution — has been sequenced. Comparison with the chicken genome, the only other bird genome available, shows that genes that have neural function and are implicated in the cognitive processing of song have been evolving rapidly in the finch lineage. Moreover, vocal communication engages much of the transcriptome of the zebra finch brain.

    • Wesley C. Warren
    • , David F. Clayton
    •  & Richard K. Wilson

  • News |

    Insect sperm fight one another with brute force and chemical weapons.

    • John Whitfield

  • News & Views |

    Pipefish and related species provide rare examples of extreme male parental care. Controlled breeding experiments allow the resulting conflicts of interest between female, male and offspring to be explored.

    • Anders Berglund

  • News & Views |

    Mosquitoes' odorant receptors help the insects to find humans and, inadvertently, to transmit malaria. The identification of the odorants that bind to these receptors opens up ways of reducing mosquito biting.

    • Walter S. Leal

  • Authors |

    Spider silk structure holds secret to catching water as well as flies.

  • News & Views |

    Detailed analyses of foot kinematics and kinetics in barefoot and shod runners offer a refined understanding of bipedalism in human evolution. This research will also prompt fresh studies of running injuries.

    • William L. Jungers

  • Letter |

    Although humans have engaged in long-distance running either barefoot or with minimal footwear for most of human evolutionary history, the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. Here, runners who habitually run in sports shoes are shown to run differently to those who habitually run barefoot, with the latter often landing on the fore-foot rather than the rear-foot. This strike pattern may have evolved to protect from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by runners.

    • Daniel E. Lieberman
    • , Madhusudhan Venkadesan
    •  & Yannis Pitsiladis

  • Letter |

    Echolocation is usually associated with bats. Many echolocating bats produce signals in the larynx, but a few species produce tongue clicks. Here, studies show that in all bats that use larynx-generated clicks, the stylohyal bone is connected to the tympanic bone. Study of the stylohyal and tympanic bones of a primitive fossil bat indicates that this species may have been able to echolocate, despite previous evidence to the contrary, raising the question of when and how echolocation evolved in bats.

    • Nina Veselka
    • , David D. McErlain
    •  & M. Brock Fenton

  • Letter |

    Animals use the Earth's magnetic field for orientation but the biophysical basis of this is unclear. The light-dependent magnetic sense of Drosophila melanogaster was recently shown to be mediated by the cryptochrome (Cry) photoreceptor; here, using a transgenic approach, the type 1 and 2 Cry of the monarch butterfly are shown to both function in the magnetoreception system of Drosophila, and probably use an unconventional photochemical mechanism.

    • Robert J. Gegear
    • , Lauren E. Foley
    •  & Steven M. Reppert

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