Using radiographs and diagrams, this article reviews the most commonly used axes and angles of the foot, including: longitudinal axis of the rearfoot, collum tali axis, talocalcaneal angle, cuboid abduction angle, longitudinal axis of the lesser tarsus, lesser tarsus angle, talonavicular angle, longitudinal axis of the metatarsus, forefoot adductus angle, metatarsus adductus angle, first interm...

A new genus, Oulenziella, is proposed for Oulenzia bakeri (Hughes, 1962), a species originally collected on jute (Corchorus sp., Malvaceae) from India. Oulenziella bakeri (Hughes, 1962) comb. nov. is re-described. Oulenzia gossypii Meyer & Rodrigues, 1965 collected from Gossypium sp. in Mozambique is considered a junior synonym of Oulenziella bakeri. The new genus differs from Oulenzia in havin...

Global warming may affect the physiology, distributions, phenology and adaptations of plants and animals. In Israel, minimum summer temperatures increased by an average of 0.26 degrees C per decade during the second half of the 20th century. Bergmann's rule predicts that, in warm-blooded animals, races from warm regions are smaller than races from cold regions. Numerous studies have reported ge...

Environmental conditions affect growth and development and, through developmental plasticity, create phenotypic variation. In suboptimal conditions current survival is traded-off against development. Corticosterone, the main glucocorticoid in birds, may be involved in the reallocation of energy from growth to maintenance, but its effect on growth has rarely been investigated in altricial birds ...

In the Drosophila leg, activation of Notch leads to the establishment of the joints that subdivide the appendage into segments. We find that mutations in bowl result in similar phenotypes to Notch, causing fusion and truncations of tarsal segments (tarsomeres) and, like its close relative Odd-skipped, Bowl is produced in response to Notch signalling at a subset of segment boundaries. However, d...

The extent to which fluctuating selection can maintain evolutionary stasis in most populations remains an unresolved question in evolutionary biology. Climate has been hypothesized to drive reversals in the direction of selection among different time periods and may also be responsible for intense episodic selection caused by rare weather events. We measured viability selection associated with ...

Rearing full siblings under different environmental conditions allows partitioning of the total phenotypic variance of a trait into its genetic and environmental components. This, in natural bird populations, is usually achieved by cross-fostering experimental designs. We estimated genetic and environmental components of nestling-fitness traits using an alternative experimental approach in a ma...