Showing papers in "Animal Behaviour in 1997"

TL;DR: The study confirms predicted trends linking opportunism, brain size and rate of structural evolution and suggests that innovation rate in the field may be a useful measure of behavioural plasticity.

TL;DR: It is concluded that, in addition to their function in perception advertisement, diana monkey long-distance calls function as within-group semantic signals that denote different types of predators.

TL;DR: Deviations from these patterns by a unimale group indicate that male reproductive strategies may also play a role in habitat selection, and supports hypothesis 4.

TL;DR: Both observations and experiments suggest that the benefits of friendships to females derive from the protection of their infants against infanticide.

TL;DR: The results suggest that the tendency to shoal may facilitate a simple form of guided social learning, which allows guppies to learn about their local environments, and imply that selectively neutral behavioural alternatives may be maintained as traditions in aggregated animal populations by very simple social mechanisms.

TL;DR: This paper presented a framework for analysing the social structure of populations in which interactions between some identified individuals can be observed Statistics describing the nature, quality and temporal patterning of one or more interaction measures are used to define relationships between pairs of individuals or classes of individual.

TL;DR: Yellow-bellied marmots, Marmota flaviventris were reported to produce qualitatively different alarm calls in response to different predators, but there was significant individual variation in call structure, but acoustic parameters that were individually variable were not used to communicate variation in risk.

TL;DR: It is argued that contrafreeloading does not contradict reinforcement theory, provided that the sensory reinforcement obtained from stimuli associated with the earned food is also taken into account.

TL;DR: This article showed that fish prefer to school with familiar individuals and that schooling preferences for familiar female guppies,Poecilia reticulata, developed gradually over 12 days, but once established were maintained.

TL;DR: It is concluded that male diet is a significant factor in determining male reproductive success and affects the ability to gain copulations with virgin females, and the receptivity of these females to further copulations.

TL;DR: The asymmetry in effects of single experiences of victory and defeat is consistent with studies on other vertebrates and supports the hypothesis that losing fights in males negatively affects behaviour directly related to their fitness.

TL;DR: Relationships between song structure and social context suggest that some features, such as the rattle, might have originally evolved to serve in male-male interactions; a female preference may have further promoted song evolution leading to complex syllable repertoires.

TL;DR: A capacity for rapid and flexible associative learning presumably allows butterflies to adjust their foraging efforts in response to floral rewards that vary over space or time.

TL;DR: It is suggested that the white forehead patch of male collared flycatchers may function as a badge of status that is also used in sexually selected contests over resources when alternative vacant sites exist in the neighbourhood.

TL;DR: In the field cricket, Gryllus bimaculatus, the male response to females (courtship song) was completely abolished by using an organic solvent to remove cuticular hydrocarbons and associated compounds from a stimulus female.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined male-male contests over access to males in the spider Argyrodes antipodiana and found that naive males in their first contest were more likely to escalate that contest if the pair consisted of large males.

TL;DR: The results show that the presence of an appropriate substrate for dustbathing does not prevent domestic chicks from developing feather pecking, and housing conditions that promote foraging behaviour are effective in reducing and preventing Feather pecking.

TL;DR: How to characterize each case from an understanding of its expected optimal behaviour as predicted by formal models is discussed, and three different 'reasons' which arise from three different receiver assessment rules are reviewed.

TL;DR: Generating predictions with the interactive factors hypothesis may be a more realistic approach for understanding vigilance and other anti-predator behaviours.

TL;DR: The results suggest that nesting blackbirds altered their nest defence to compensate for the predation risk associated with a nest’s location, and may have been dependent on the nest's detectability, and to a lesser extent height.

TL;DR: The results supported the food patch defence hypothesis, that social calls are used to warn off other bats of the same phonic type when insects are scarce, and supported the hypothesis that the two phonic types are sibling species.

TL;DR: This study is the first to demonstrate that females can benefit materially as well as genetically by copulating outside their pair bond and illustrates the need for manipulative tests to understand fully the reproductive strategies of individuals in populations where social relationships often do not reflect genetic relationships.

TL;DR: Despite fundamental individual differences in the observer group and the failure to find a significant group effect, the results indicate that marmosets are capable of learning simple motor skills through conspecific observation.

TL;DR: Scent-marks appear to provide internal information to the members of the resident pack (internal map of territory, breeding condition, reproductive synchrony) and enhance demarcation of territorial boundaries.

TL;DR: This model confirms that a surprisingly small and simple set of behavioural rules are not only sufficient for wall construction but also for the formation of one or more nest entrances, and predicts that the nests of these ants are likely to exhibit interesting dynamics, in which the tendency to build a new larger nest may lag behind growth of the population that the nest has to house.

TL;DR: Results suggest a mechanism for mate choice via odour preferences based on the protein content of the food consumed by potential partners, which may also be a means of choosing a higher-‘quality’ individual.

TL;DR: The onset of constancy for bees that had had no experience with the experimental apparatus is described and it is shown that spontaneous in honey bees, but it can be hidden by some experimental protocols designed to study learning.

TL;DR: This article found that the winner's total energy expenditure usually exceeded the loser's, and that the cumulative energetic costs of combat for both opponents increased with decreases in asymmetry of mass and energy expenditure rate.

TL;DR: Variation in testosterone can affect male attractiveness to females and thus male copulatory success, and testosterone has the potential to mediate all aspects of male reproductive behaviour and may provide a mechanism through which males adjust their full range of breeding behaviours to fit their current status.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that invertebrate acoustic signals can provide information about male phenotypic attributes, and that females can use this acoustic information in mate choice to select a phenotypically superior mate.