• Southern Ocean food-webs and climate change : a short review and future directions 

  Queiros, Jose P.; Borras-Chavez, Renato; Friscourt, Noemie; Groß, Jasmin; Lewis, Candice B.; Mergard, Georgia; O’Brien, Katie (Public Library of Science, 2024-03-11)

  Food-webs are a critical feature of ecosystems and help us understand how communities will respond to climate change. The Southern Ocean is facing rapid and accelerating changes due to climate change. Though having evolved ...
• Successful alien plant species exhibit functional dissimilarity from natives under varied climatic conditions but not under increased nutrient availability 

  Milanovic, Marija; Bakker, Jonathan D.; Biederman, Lori; Borer, Elizabeth; Catford, Jane A.; Cleland, Elsa; Hagenah, Nicole; Haider, Sylvia; Harpole, W. Stanley; Komatsu, Kimberly; Macdougall, Andrew S.; Roemermann, Christine; Seabloom, Eric W.; Knapp, Sonja; Kuehn, Ingolf (Wiley, 2025-03)

  AIMS : The community composition of native and alien plant species is influenced by the environment (e.g., nutrient addition and changes in temperature or precipitation). A key objective of our study is to understand how ...
• Effect of exogenous manipulation of glucocorticoid concentrations on meerkat heart rate, behaviour and vocal production 

  Driscoll, Isabel; Briefer, Elodie F.; Ganswindt, Andre; Manser, Marta B. (Elsevier, 2025-02)

  Encoding of emotional arousal in vocalisations is commonly observed in the animal kingdom, and provides a rapid means of information transfer about an individual's affective responses to internal and external stimuli. As ...
• Feeding through the ages : revisiting the diet of meerkats 

  Jubber, Walter R.; Manser, Marta B.; Fuller, Andrea (Elsevier, 2025-03)

  We investigated the diet and foraging behaviour of a social carnivore, the meerkat (Suricata suricatta), living in stochastic dryland, and examined seasonal, as well as age-related variation in diet. Insecta constituted ...
• The challenges, opportunities and future of comparative physiology in the Global South : perspectives of early-career researchers 

  Bars-Closel, Melissa; Capparelli, Mariana V.; Conradie, Shannon R.; Diele-Viegas, Luisa Maria; Donaldson, Ashleigh C.; Kosmala, Georgia K.; Madelaire, Carla B.; De Mello, Daniela M.D.; Majelantle, Tshepiso L.; Martins, Mariana F.; Moreira, Daniel C.; Ngcamphalala, Celiwe A.; Noakes, Matthew J.; Shankar, Anusha; Webster, Andrea B. (Company of Biologists, 2024-10)

  Researchers in the Global South (GS, developing countries) make valuable contributions to the field of comparative physiology, but face economic and scientific disparities and several unique challenges compared with ...
• Light sensitivity of the circadian system in the social highveld mole-rat Cryptomys hottentotus pretoriae 

  Chanel, Pauline N.C.; Bennett, Nigel C.; Oosthuizen, Maria Kathleen (Company of Biologists, 2024-09)

  Highveld mole-rats (Cryptomys hottentotus pretoriae) are social rodents that inhabit networks of subterranean tunnels. In their natural environment, they are rarely exposed to light, and consequently their visual systems ...
• Evolutionary shifts in the thermal biology of a subterranean mammal : the effect of habitat aridity 

  Merchant, Hana N.; Hart, Daniel William; Bennett, Nigel C.; Janse van Vuuren, Andries Koch; Freeman, Marc Trevor; McKechnie, Andrew E.; Faulkes, Chris G.; Mordaunt, Nathan D.; Portugal, Steven J. (Company of Biologists, 2024-12)

  Subterranean mammals representing a single subspecies occurring along an aridity gradient provide an appropriate model for investigating adaptive variation in thermal physiology with varying levels of precipitation and ...
• Contest competition and injury in adult male sub-Antarctic fur seals 

  Bester, Marthan Nieuwoudt; Rossouw, G.J.; Van Staden, Paul Jacobus (Springer, 2024-05)

  We recorded intra-sexual behaviour of adult male sub-Antarctic fur seals Arctocephalus tropicalis at Gough Island, Southern Ocean, during the 1975/76 summer breeding season. Our re-analysed data address male ‘contest ...
• Use of acoustic signals in Cape fur seal mother–pup reunions : individual signature, signal propagation and pup home range 

  Martin, Mathilde; Gridley, Tess; Immerz, Antonia; Elwen, Simon H.; Charrier, Isabelle (Company of Biologists, 2024-07)

  The Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) is one of the most colonial mammals, with colonies of up to hundreds of thousands of individuals during the breeding season. During the lactation period, mothers and ...
• A mouse in the spotlight : response capacity to artificial light at night in a rodent pest species, the southern multimammate mouse (Mastomys coucha) 

  Oosthuizen, Tasha; Pillay, Neville; Oosthuizen, Maria Kathleen (Elsevier, 2024-12)

  Multimammate mice are prolific breeders, can cause significant agricultural damage, and are reservoir hosts for a number of pathogens. They are nocturnal and given their success in urbanised rural environments, we ...
• A frog in hot water : the effect of temperature elevation on the adrenal stress response of an African amphibian 

  Scheun, Juan; Venter, Leanne; Ganswindt, Andre (PeerJ Inc., 2024-08)

  Amphibians, with their unique physiology and habitat requirements, are especially vulnerable to changes in environmental temperatures. While the activation of the physiological stress response can help to mitigate the ...
• Genome sequencing of historical encephalomyocarditis viruses from South Africa links the historical 1993/4 savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) outbreak to cryptic mastomys rodents 

  Van Meer, Vanessa; Paweska, Janusz Tadeusz; Swanepoel, Robert; Grobbelaar, Antoinette; Bastos, Armanda D.S. (MDPI, 2024-03)

  From 1993 to 1994, 64 free-ranging elephants (Loxodonta africana) succumbed to encephalomyocarditis in the Kruger National Park, South Africa, of which 83% were adult bulls. Mastomys rodents were implicated as the reservoir ...
• Where do core thalamocortical axons terminate in mammalian neocortex when there is no cytoarchitecturally distinct layer 4? 

  Bhagwandin, Adhil; Molnar, Zoltan; Bertelsen, Mads F.; Karlsson, Karl Æ.; Alagaili, Abdulaziz N.; Bennett, Nigel Charles; Hof, Patrick R.; Kaswera-Kyamakya, Consolate; Gilissen, Emmanuel; Jayakumar, Jaikishan; Manger, Paul R. (Wiley, 2024-07)

  Although the mammalian cerebral cortex is most often described as a hexalaminar structure, there are cortical areas (primary motor cortex) and species (elephants, cetaceans, and hippopotami), where a cytoarchitecturally ...
• Timely questions emerging in chronobiology : the circadian clock keeps on ticking 

  Chawla, Sangeeta; O'Neill, John; Knight, Marina I.; He, Yuqing; Wang, Lei; Maronde, Erik; Rodriguez, Sergio Gil; Van Ooijen, Gerben; Garbarino-Pico, Eduardo; Wolf, Eva; Dkhissi-Benyahya, Ouria; Nikhat, Anjoom; Ckakrabarti, Shaon; Youngstedt, Shawn D.; Mak, Natalie Zi-ching; Provencio, Ignacio; Oster, Henrik; Goel, Namni; Caba, Mario; Oosthuizen, Maria Kathleen; Duffield, Giles E.; Chabot, Christopher; Davis, Seth J. (Ubiquity Press, 2024-04-02)

  Chronobiology investigations have revealed much about cellular and physiological clockworks but we are far from having a complete mechanistic understanding of the physiological and ecological implications. Here we present ...
• Sightings of dwarf minke whales in the Southern Hemisphere during the SOWER cruises 

  Kato, Hidehiro; Matsuoka, Koji; Nakamura, Gen; Best, Peter B. (International Whaling Commission, 2024-04)

  This paper examines sightings of dwarf minke whales during the SOWER cruises. A total of 12 sightings were made between 1994/95 and 2003/04, across a relatively wide latitude (37°S–62°S) but limited longitude, between IWC ...
• The SOWER programme in the Antarctic : background, aims and objectives 

  Best, Peter B.; Ohsumi, S.; Kato, H.; Donovan, G.P. (International Whaling Commission, 2024-02)

  The International Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed limits on the catch of Antarctic minke whales close to the start of commercial whaling in the 1970s. These management efforts were hampered by the challenge of obtaining ...
• Overview of the SOWER cruise circumpolar acoustic survey data and analyses of Antarctic blue whale calls 

  Shabangu, Fannie Welcome; Stafford, Kathleen M.; Findlay, Kenneth Pierce; Rankin, Shannon; Ljungblad, Don; Tsuda, Yasunari; Morse, Laura; Clark, Christopher W.; Kato, Hidehiro; Ensor, Paul (International Whaling Commission, 2024-02)

  The International Whaling Commission (IWC) carried out blue whale research within its annual Southern Ocean Whale and Ecosystem Research (SOWER) cruises between 1996 and 2010. Over 700 sonobuoys were deployed to record ...
• Water provisioning shapes carnivore community structure 

  Somers, Michael J.; Walters, Michele (Elsevier, 2024-12)

  Water provisioning is common in arid and semi-arid African ecosystems, but its effects on carnivore communities are not understood. Recently, Morin et al. documented the unexpectedly contrasting space-use patterns of ...
• A field-friendly alternative to freeze-drying faeces for glucocorticoid metabolite quantification in animals of different feeding classes 

  Osburn, Kayla Rae; Crossey, Bruce Gareth; Majelantle, Tshepiso L; Ganswindt, Andre (Elsevier, 2024-12)

  Monitoring stress-related faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (fGCM) concentrations is a reliable, popular and established approach for understanding wildlife responses to perceived stressors. To maintain fGCM integrity ...
• First record of gastrointestinal parasites of African otters 

  Somers, Michael J.; Loggenberg, Jancke L.; McIntyre, Trevor (IUCN Otter Specialist Group, 2024-06)

  Parasites are found in many mammalian species, particularly in the gastrointestinal tract. They can spread from one species to another and cause severe diseases in some species. Parasite spread is especially important ...

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