, 697-706 first published online 11 November 2009 277 2010 Proc. R. Soc. B and Per J. Palsbøll Martin G. Raphael, S. Kim Nelson, Richard T. Golightly, Laura McFarlane-Tranquilla, Scott Newman M. Zachariah Peery, Laurie A. Hall, Anna Sellas, Steven R. Beissinger, Craig Moritz, Martine Bérubé, fragmentation suggest decoupling of migration and gene flow after habitat Genetic analyses of historic a...

Housing is both a key indicator of, and contributor to, social advantage/disadvantage. Opportunities for wealth creation, affordability, sense of security and belonging to community and place, level of choice, self-esteem and self-determination are all linked to housing and, more specifi cally, to tenure type with its resulting (and often hidden) inequity. Issues relating to affordability and a...

Oviparous species that do not guard their eggs during development may suffer significant embryonic mortality. However, the way females lay eggs may help prevent this. For example, females of several newt species carefully wrap single eggs into leaves of aquatic vegetation in shallow water. Wrapping behaviour may protect eggs from predators and from mechanical damage. We hypothesized that egg-wr...

Learning is crucial to the survival of organisms across their life span, including during embryonic development. We set out to determine when learning becomes possible in amphibian development by exposing spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) embryos to chemical stimuli from a predator (Ambystoma opacum), nonpredator (Lithobates clamitans), or control at developmental stages 16-21 or 36-38 (...

Fat in meat greatly improves eating quality, yet many consumers avoid visible fat, mainly because of health concerns. Generations of consumers, especially in the English-speaking world, have been convinced by health authorities that animal fat, particularly saturated or solid fat, should be reduced or avoided to maintain a healthy diet. Decades of negative messages regarding animal fats has res...

Reports of sexual dichromatism in salamanders are rare and have been generally restricted to a few species in the families Hynobiidae and Salamandridae. We used image analysis techniques to examine sexual dichromatism in the marbled salamander, Ambystoma opacum (Gravenhorst, 1807). We measured the average hue of white saddles on male and female marbled salamanders (n = 118), as well as the prop...

Multiple theories predict the evolution of foraging rates in response to environmental variation in predation risk, intraspecific competition, time constraints, and temperature. We tested six hypotheses for the evolution of foraging rate in 24 spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) populations from three latitudinally divergent sites using structural equation models derived from theory and ap...

The spreading of new crayfish species poses a serious risk for freshwater ecosystems; because they are omnivores they influence more than one level in the trophic chain and they represent a significant part of the benthic biomass. Both the environmental change through global warming and the expansion of the pet trade increase the possibilities of their spreading. We investigated the potential o...