Zoology articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Losses in biodiversity and the emergence of new infectious diseases are among the greatest threats to life on the planet. The declines in amphibian populations lie at the interface between these issues.

    • Andrew R. Blaustein
    •  & Pieter T. J. Johnson

  • Letter |

    What is the best way for predators to find food when prey is sparse and distributed unpredictably? Theory predicts that in such circumstances predators should adopt a Lé-flight strategy, in which short exploratory hops are occasionally interspersed with longer trips. When prey is abundant, simple Brownian motion should suffice. Now, analysis of a large data set of marine predators establishes that animals do indeed adopt Lévy-flight foraging when prey is sparse, and Brownian episodes when prey is abundant.

    • Nicolas E. Humphries
    • , Nuno Queiroz
    •  & David W. Sims

  • Letter |

    The 505-million-year-old Burgess Shales of British Columbia are justifiably famous for the exquisite preservation of their fossils, and for the extreme oddity of many of them. One such is Nectocaris pteryx, which, from the few fossils available for study, looked like a chordate fused with an arthropod. However, the collection and examination of more fossils of Nectocaris suggests that it in fact represents an early offshoot of cephalopod molluscs — a kind of squid, though with two rather than eight or ten tentacles.

    • Martin R. Smith
    •  & Jean-Bernard Caron

  • Letter |

    The Burgess Shales of British Columbia are famous for having yielded fossils of soft-bodied creatures from the Middle Cambrian period. Although similar faunas are now known from localities as far apart as China and Greenland, they seem to have died out before the end of the Cambrian. Or did they? Here, the discovery of a Burgess Shale-type fauna from the Ordovician period in Morocco is reported, showing that creatures of this type persisted beyond the end of the Cambrian.

    • Peter Van Roy
    • , Patrick J. Orr
    •  & Derek E. G. Briggs

  • Books & Arts |

    Deborah M. Gordon enjoys a photographic paean to individual ants and their rarely glimpsed exploits on behalf of the collective.

    • Deborah M. Gordon

  • Letter |

    What agents of selection shape creatures in the wild? The answer for the brown anole lizard seems to be competition with its fellows, rather than predation from without. Bird or snake predators were included or excluded across six Caribbean islands that ranged from low to high population densities of lizards. Although the presence of predators altered lizard behaviour, it was increases in lizard population density that altered the lizard's phenotype, favouring larger size, longer legs and increased stamina for running.

    • Ryan Calsbeek
    •  & Robert M. Cox

  • News and Views Q&A |

    The ability to perceive Earth's magnetic field, which at one time was dismissed as a physical impossibility, is now known to exist in diverse animals. The receptors for the magnetic sense remain elusive. But it seems that at least two underlying mechanisms exist — sometimes in the same organism.

    • Kenneth J. Lohmann

  • 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

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