killifish

The Arizona Physiological Society held their 8th annual conference Nov 13-14 at Midwestern University in Glendale. This was a great meeting for comparative physiologists! Here are some comparative physiology highlights from the meeting:   The 2015 Keynote Speaker was Dr. Andrew Biewener (Harvard University) who spoke about "How do running animals acheive stability? The neuromechanical control of rapid locomotion." In his talk he focused on understanding how Guinea fowl avoid tripping when running really fast over uneven surfaces. The 2015 Arizona Distinguished Lecture was given by Dr. Eldon…
The streams of Trinidad and Tobago are home to the most unexpected of landscape gardeners. They're guppies - tiny and beautifully coloured fish, just an inch or so long. Without tools or plans, they shape the environment around them, tweaking everything from the numbers of different species to the nutrients in the water. The guppies are quick to adapt to different environments and particularly to which predators are around. The number and types of predators affect the guppies' lifespan, how big they get and when they become sexually mature. This, in turn, affects what they eat, and that…
Scientists were startled last month when they discovered that mangrove killifish, a fish native to Florida, Central America and the Caribbean, spend weeks of the year living in the rotten branches of trees, fully out of the water. The fish typically live in pools of water made by the roots of mangrove trees. When those pools dry up, however, the fish "flop their way" into rotten branches, using tunnels dug out by insects. There they... If you listen carefully, you can hear them singing... line up end to end with one another and wait out waterier pastures. Three details make the killifish…