Editors' choice – Signalling cocktail secures octopus mum's fate

^{Image credit: Yan Wang}
Motherhood is a fatal commitment for female octopuses, who fast as they tend their developing brood of eggs, then die just as the eggs hatch. Over 40 years ago, this selfless sacrifice was shown to be driven by the optic gland, buried deep in the female octopus brain. Now, Yan Wang and Clifton Ragsdale describe how a cocktail of signalling molecules coordinating various physiological processes is responsible for the new mother’s demise.

Conversation – Chris Richards

“I learned early on that I need to have at least two things going on at once, because if one thing is not going well, then I can switch to the other.”  

Chris Richards is a Research Fellow at The Royal Veterinary College in the UK, where he studies the evolution of the frog musculo-skeletal system. He talked to us about deciding between music and science and how Britain leaving the European Union (Brexit) is directly affecting him and his family.

Commentary – Deciphering V̇_O2,max: limits of the genetic approach

Hans Hoppeler discusses how V̇_O2,max, as a multigenetic phenotype, appears as an emergent property of the underlying transcriptomic networks and thus cannot be deciphered by gene-based approaches alone.

^{Photo credit: Daylin Sigler}
Most hibernators drop their body temperatures and arouse briefly during hibernation, but not tenrecs. In a new Research Article, Frank van Breukelen and colleagues show that the little beasties are perfectly happy charging around at body temps of 12°C, when other tenrecs hibernate, and they never have interbout arousals, no matter how cold they get.

Review – Can variation among hypoxic environments explain why different fish species use different hypoxic survival strategies?

Milica Mandic and Matthew D. Regan explore how aquatic hypoxic environments with similar oxygen and time duration dynamics appear to select for similar total hypoxic responses in distantly related species.

preLights – Dinner, dominance or death

Rasmus Ern highlights a recent preprint from Takuya Sato and colleagues that investigates the effects of predation pressure and resource abundance on foraging behaviour of fish in social dominance hierarchies.