Scorpio Linnaeus, 1758 (family Scorpionidae Latreille, 1802) was considered monotypic for over a century, and comprised a single species, Scorpio maurus Linnaeus, 1758, with 19 subspecies, distributed from West Africa, throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East, to Iran. Two parapatric subspecies, Scorpio maurus fuscus (Ehrenberg, 1829) and Scorpio maurus palmatus (Ehrenberg, 1828), have long b...

Sediment community oxygen consumption (SCOC) is a proxy for organic matter processing and thus provides a useful proxy of benthic ecosystem function. Oxygen uptake in deep-sea sediments is mainly driven by bacteria, and the direct contribution of benthic macro- and mega-infauna respiration is thought to be relatively modest. However, the main contribution of infaunal organisms to benthic respir...

BACKGROUND The study of locomotion in vermiform animals has largely been restricted to animals crawling on agar surfaces. While this has been fruitful in the study of neuronal basis of disease and behavior, the reduced physical challenge posed by these environments has prevented these organisms from being equally successful in the study of neuromuscular diseases. Our burrowing assay allowed us ...

Habituation is an active process that allows animals to learn to identify repeated, harmless events, and so could help individuals deal with the trade-off between reducing the risk of predation and minimizing escape costs. Safe habituation requires an accurate distinction between dangerous and harmless events, but in natural environments such an assessment is challenging because sensory informa...

The genus Calliapagurops was established by de Saint Laurent (1973) for the new species C. charcoti based on a damaged specimen lacking the abdomen and both third and fourth pereopods. The specimen was collected south of the Azorean island of Flores from shelly sand in 190–230 m depth. The original description by de Saint Laurent (1973) was rather short; a redescription and figures were later p...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.12.007 0003-3472/© 2014 The Authors. Published on behalf o ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-n Some social signals are sexually selected both by female mating preferences and by maleemale competition for mates. Studies of the behavioural mechanisms that mediate responses to these signals provide insight into how sexual selection operates...

A foraging fiddler crab can estimate how close a potential intruder is from its burrow entrance, even when the entrance in the sand is invisible to the crab. Recent work shows that, to assess this depth interval, crabs combine information from vision and path integration in an unusual manner.

The burrowing responses of a common tropical bivalve, the short-neck clam Ruditapes philippinarum, to cadmium (Cd)-spiked sediment, variations of sediment grain size and natural sediments collected from 15 locations in Hong Kong's inshore waters were investigated through a series of laboratory tests. Results showed that the burrowing response exhibited a negative relationship with an increase i...