To traverse complex three-dimensional terrain with large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, the most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize near-steady-st...
Locomotion is a key aspect associated with ecologically relevant tasks for many organisms, therefore, survival often depends on their ability to perform well at these tasks. Despite this significance, we have little idea how different performance tas...
Our current understanding of manipulation is based on primate hands, resulting in a detailed but narrow perspective of ways to handle objects. Although most other animals lack hands, they are still capable of flexible manipulation of diverse objects,...
Fish routinely accelerate during locomotor manoeuvres, yet little is known about the dynamics of acceleration performance. Thunniform fish use their lunate caudal fin to generate lift-based thrust during steady swimming, but the lift is limited durin...
Seasonal influenza viruses are constantly changing and produce a different set of circulating strains each season. Small genetic changes can accumulate over time and result in antigenically different viruses; this may prevent the body's immune system...
Diseases that spread to humans from animals, zoonoses, pose major threats to human health. Identifying animal reservoirs of zoonoses and predicting future outbreaks are increasingly important to human health and well-being and economic stability, par...
Müllerian mimicry theory states that frequency-dependent selection should favour geographical convergence of harmful species onto a shared colour pattern. As such, mimetic patterns are commonly circumscribed into discrete mimicry complexes, each cont...
Documented occurrences of fossil taxa are the empirical foundation for understanding large-scale biodiversity changes and evolutionary dynamics in deep time. The fossil record contains vast amounts of understudied taxa. Yet the compilation of huge vo...
Coral reefs worldwide face unprecedented cumulative anthropogenic effects of interacting local human pressures, global climate change and distal social processes. Reefs are also bound by the natural biophysical environment within which they exist. In...
The complex transmission ecologies of vector-borne and zoonotic diseases pose challenges to their control, especially in changing landscapes. Human incidence of zoonotic malaria ( Plasmodium knowlesi) is associated with deforestation although mechani...