Editorial 2010

The year 2009 has been another excellent year for Biology Letters, with an approximately 25 per cent increase in submissions over 2008. Our impact factor has gone up to 3, and we are confident that it will rise again this coming year; we now compare well with the major specialist journals in the main fields that we publish. We continue to attract more than our fair share of attention in the media and in journals such as Nature. Our average speed of acceptance (23.4 days) and time from article submission to online publication (56 days) have once again improved. This represents a major attraction of the journal and is made possible because of the constant efforts of our editorial board members, reviewers, and Fiona Pring and Louise Gardner in the publishing office. The increase in submissions has created a large additional workload for all of these people, to which they have responded magnificently. Since we are keeping the size of the journal constant, the rejection rate has gone up in response, which should lead to an increase in the already high quality of our published papers.

The year 2009 was, of course, the Darwin bicentenary and 150th anniversary of The origin of species. Since a large proportion of our papers are on evolutionary topics, we felt that it was especially appropriate for Biology Letters to contribute to the Darwinian festivities. We have published three special features (on brain evolution, molecular evolution, and the evolution of sexual conflict and sex allocation) and five opinion pieces on Darwinian themes. Many thanks are due to the guest editors (Tom Smulders, Lindell Bromham and Tracey Chapman) and authors (Lindell Bromham, John Brookfield, Joan Herbers, John Pannell and Paul Schmid-Hempel) involved. In 2010, the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, we are publishing a special feature on ‘Control and dynamics of animal movement’, edited by Andy Biewener and Tom Daniel. Our other new feature, in addition to the special features and opinion pieces, is meeting reports. These have been coming in at a satisfyingly high rate, covering a wide range of fields, and I believe will raise the journal's profile, as seen in their regular appearance in our monthly most-downloaded articles.

As before, I would like to highlight some papers that I found especially interesting in the 2009 volume. Davison et al. (2009) added a new twist to the classic story of the right/left coiling polymorphism in the snail Lymnaea stagnalis, by showing that mating behaviour is inherited in the same way as chirality, i.e. it is controlled by the maternal genotype. Larsen et al. (2009) showed that a tropical species of dung beetle has evolved to become a predator on millipedes, often decapitating them by using the front of their heads. Reding et al. (2009) showed that the Hawaiian creeper Oreomystis mana, which closely resembles the Kauai creeper Oreomystis bairdi, in fact is related to a very distant group of birds. This is an amazing example of convergent evolution, illustrating once again what Darwin called ‘the power of selection’. Ratcliffe et al. (2009) showed that a single sensory neuron in the dogbane tiger moth provides enough information to allow a decision on whether to produce a defensive sound. Moore et al. (2009) showed that the protein which binds the toxin produced by toads has experienced rapid, adaptive evolution in toads, subsequent to their divergence from related anurans, presumably reflecting adaptations to avoidance of self-poisoning. Finally, Clarke et al. (2009) made the fascinating discovery that a tropical pitcher plant is used as a lavatory by tree shrews. The shrews are attracted by a tasty exudate from the plants. The plant benefits from the nitrogen they donate and has seemingly abandoned insectivory. Needless to say, the front cover of the October issue shows a tree shrew in action!