REVIEWS
- Olfactory navigation in aquatic gastropods
Summary: Review of the past research and future prospects for understanding odour-based navigation behaviour by gastropods, covering behavioural patterns, navigational strategies and neural underpinnings.
- Behavioural and neuronal basis of olfactory imprinting and kin recognition in larval fish
Summary: This Review focuses on olfactory imprinting processes that numerous species use to recognize kin or their natal environment later in life.
- There and back again: natal homing by magnetic navigation in sea turtles and salmon
Summary: New findings indicate that long-distance natal homing in salmon and sea turtles involves an ability to navigate back to the magnetic signature of the home area.
- The internal maps of insects
Summary: Insect behaviour can be explained as a combination of path integration, vector memory and view memory, but what is the evidence that these geometric capabilities form an integrated map?
- The genetics and epigenetics of animal migration and orientation: birds, butterflies and beyond
Summary: This Review summarizes our understanding of the genetics and epigenetics of animal migration and outlines a vision to harness both technical advances and comparative approaches to move the field forward.
- Non-Euclidean navigation
Summary: The behavioral evidence for Euclidean cognitive maps is unpersuasive. Recent experiments indicate that human spatial knowledge is better described by a labeled graph, which incorporates local distance and angle information.
- Using on-board sound recordings to infer behaviour of free-moving wild animals
Summary: We review new possibilities for monitoring the behaviour of wild animals in the field using on-board audio recordings.
- The potential of virtual reality for spatial navigation research across the adult lifespan
Summary: This Review describes how virtual reality is used to study spatial navigation across species and discusses the benefits and challenges when using it in older age groups.
- The insect central complex and the neural basis of navigational strategies
Summary: Neural circuits of the insect central complex are involved in guiding multiple navigation strategies, and the emerging core circuit for navigational decisions might provide an overarching framework of central-complex function.
- Celestial navigation in Drosophila
Summary: In this Review, we describe how the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, uses the position of the sun and the pattern of polarized skylight to maintain a constant heading during long-distance dispersal flights.
- The brain behind straight-line orientation in dung beetles
Summary: Insights into the neural mechanisms underlying compass orientation in dung beetles are placed into the context of the mechanisms of other insects.
- Origin and role of path integration in the cognitive representations of the hippocampus: computational insights into open questions
Summary: Path integration is one of the fundamental computations giving rise to the cognitive map and possibly other non-spatial representations in the hippocampal formation and its subcortical afferents.
- Merging information in the entorhinal cortex: what can we learn from robotics experiments and modeling?
Summary: Grid cells related to path integration and vision are explained as modulo projections of different cortical activities. The entorhinal cortex appears as a generic merging tool building hash codes.
- Navigation and the developing brain
Summary: Spatial development in humans takes a decade or more to unfold, and involves tuning initial systems in response to changing motor capacities and environmental feedback.
- The navigational nose: a new hypothesis for the function of the human external pyramid
Summary: The human nose respires and sniffs yet current theory addresses only its respiratory function; the nose may also allow stereo olfaction and may have evolved for this in early Homo.
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Editors’ choice – Vision is highly sensitive to oxygen availability in marine invertebrate larvae
Visual systems are highly metabolically demanding, making them sensitive to fluctuations in oxygen. For marine animals, vision is crucial to survival, but oxygen levels can vary greatly over time and depending on water depth. Lillian McCormick, Lisa Levin and Nicholas Oesch now assess the impact of reduced oxygen on the vision of marine invertebrate larvae.
“When I started at Carleton, I was interested in physics, but it turned out that I was inspired by my high school teacher and not by the subject itself.”
Heath MacMillan is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University, Canada, where he studies the physiological mechanisms limiting ectotherm performance. In this interview, Heath talks about what inspired him to become a scientist, his experience as an early career researcher, and his opinion on pre-prints in the comparative physiology field.
Obituary – Ewald R. Weibel (1929-2019)
Ewald R. Weibel passed away in February, aged 89. He continued to be fully engaged scientifically at the time of his death, preparing a draft introduction for his ultimate research paper just two weeks before his final hospitalization, write Hans Hoppeler and Stan Lindstedt. His articles and books cover three main areas: lung structure and function, stereology, and the design of the respiratory system. He will be remembered as an outstanding scientist.
The Peter Baker Fellowship is for post-doctoral scientists interested in marine biology research, especially physiological research. This fund is held in trust by the Physiological Society, The Company of Biologists and the Marine Biological Association. Application deadline: 31 January 2020.
If you’re going to the SEB annual meeting in Seville from 2 to 5 July, call by our stand to chat to JEB Reviews Editors Charlotte Rutledge and Stefan Galander and pick up free JEB goodies!
The Company of Biologists provide grants to fund scientific meetings, workshops and conferences in the fields covered by our journals. Typically, meetings with fewer than 100 people may be granted up to £2,000, increasing up to £6,000 for about 400 people. The next deadline to apply is 02 September 2019.
preLights – Active behaviour during early development shapes glucocorticoid reactivity
JEB Monitoring Editor and guest preLighter Katie Gilmour highlights a preprint from Luis Castillo-Ramírez, Soojin Ryu and Rodrigo De Marco, who establish developing zebrafish as a model system to study how early-life stress modulates the function of the stress axis and stress responses later in life.