We designed a behavioral task where rats learn to associate two temporally distinct but close-in-time events by means of incidental one-trial learning. The task takes advantage of two competing motivations - to avoid light places and to avoid painful stimuli (foot shock) predicted by an acoustic signal. Motivation to avoid a bright light is constant throughout the experiment and is manifested by rats preferring a dark compartment in a light/dark shuttle box. Motivation to stay...

Tardigrades represent one of the main animal groups with anhydrobiotic capacity at any stage of their life cycle. The ability of tardigrades to survive repeated cycles of anhydrobiosis has rarely been studied but is of interest to understand the factors constraining anhydrobiotic survival. The main objective of this study was to investigate the patterns of survival of the eutardigrade Richtersius coronifer in tardigrades under repeated cycles of desiccation, and the potential effect of repeated desiccation...

The group Anguimorpha represents one of the most unified squamate clades in terms of body plan, ecomorphology, ecophysiology and evolution. On the other hand, the anguimorphs vary between different habitats and ecological niches. Therefore, we focused on the group Anguimorpha to test a possible correlation between heart morphology and ecological niche with respect to phylogenetic position in Squamata with Sphenodon, Salvator, and Pogona as the outgroups. The chosen lepidosaurian species were investigated by microCT. Generally,...