Showing papers in "Animal Behaviour in 2015"

TL;DR: This article examined the performance of the two rank order correlation coefficients (Spearman's rho and Kendall's tau) for describing the strength of association between two continuously measured traits.

TL;DR: From these studies, it is apparent that indirect connections play an important role in animal behaviour, although future research is needed to clarify their contribution.

TL;DR: This work identifies a set of potential cognitive mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to nonhuman animals using a dual process framework and proposes that mental state attributions are supported by processes evolved in the social domain as well as by domain-general mechanisms such as inductive and causal reasoning.

TL;DR: The dolphin research has informed us on the evolution of complex social relationships and large brain evolution in mammals and the ecology of alliance formation, and variation in odontocete brain size and the large radiation of delphinids into a range of habitats holds great promise.

TL;DR: These methods for assessing the effects of emotional arousal and valence on biological parameters could lead to more effective monitoring and understanding of animal emotions, as well as to a better understanding of the evolution of emotions through cross-species comparisons.

TL;DR: Social behaviours were significantly repeatable across all timescales, with the highest repeatability observed in group size choice and unweighted degree, a measure of gregariousness, which provides rare evidence of stable social phenotypes in a wild population of animals.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed a cognitive test battery for wild New Zealand North Island robins, which consisted of six tasks based on established measures of avian cognitive performance: a motor task, colour and shape discrimination, reversal learning, spatial memory and inhibitory control.

TL;DR: It is shown that most studies ignore time-related change when estimating broad sense repeatability, and estimate R with low statistical power, which suggests a shift in focus towards obtaining robust estimates of the repeatability of behavioural and physiological traits.

TL;DR: This paper proposed a new definition of social complexity that is based on the number of differentiated relationships that individuals have and demonstrated that the definition is both broadly applicable and flexible, allowing researchers to include more detailed information about the degree of differentiation among individuals when the data are available.

TL;DR: Social network analysis is a widely used framework for quantifying structure patterns and social processes in animal populations and has allowed researchers to gain insight into a range of different biological systems and address a multitude of hypotheses.

TL;DR: It is suggested that predictable harvesting regimes with high harvest rates could create a strong selective pressure for deer to respond dynamically to the temporal change in hunting risk, given that it is linked to increased survival, an important fitness component.

TL;DR: This work demonstrates that valid inferences about individual social position and strategy can be made using partial networks in a wide range of animal social networks, highlighting the value of applying these methods in large long-term study populations.

TL;DR: In this paper, fine-scale GPS data was used to measure lions' response to humans at two scales: between land use types (commercial ranches versus pastoral lands) and with proximity to human-occupied locations (i.e., livestock enclosures: ‘bomas) within commercial ranch land.

TL;DR: The results suggest that the presence of conspecifics supported the exploration of novel objects in both wolves and dogs, particularly within kin and that this may be interpreted as risk sharing.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used an automated radiotelemetry system at Falsterbo peninsula, Sweden, to study stopover behavior and route choice in free-flying passerines departing on flights across the Baltic Sea during autumn migration.

TL;DR: Evidence that male chimpanzees trade grooming for agonistic support where hierarchies are steep and consequent effective support is a rank-related commodity is found, but not where hierarchIES are shallow, and it is found that grooming was reciprocated regardless of hierarchy steepness.

TL;DR: It is hypothesized that in this species natural selection has favoured cognitive mechanisms allowing a rapid and efficient choice of the most profitable food item within the patch.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used harmonic radar technology for flight tracking of Apis mellifera and found that the duration of long-range orientation flights decreased from the first to the fourth flight.

TL;DR: The results suggest that workers recognize larval age, probably by detecting changes in the pheromones emitted by larvae as they mature, and adjust the foraging division of labour (pollen versus nectar) to meet the nutritional needs of the colony's brood.

TL;DR: The hypothesis that female chimpanzees form well-differentiated social relationships that are of potential adaptive value to females and their offspring is supported.

TL;DR: It is found that nearly all rhinoceros beetle species were male dimorphic, that the allometric slope of major males was consistently shallower than the slope of minor males, and that the decrease in slope was greatest among species with the most exaggerated horns.

TL;DR: Investigation of the impact on both predator and prey for zebrafish, Danio rerio, preying on water fleas, and Daphnia magna confirms that elevated sound levels, and especially intermittent conditions, may affect predator–prey interactions.

TL;DR: Chimpanzees successfully used their self-experience to infer what the competitor sees in a competitive context and the results in relation to the well-known ‘goggles experiment’ are discussed.

TL;DR: It was found that bolder fish, and those paired with bolder partners, tended to approach their partner's compartment less closely, providing important insights into the mechanisms that govern the dynamics and functioning of social groups and the emergence and maintenance of consistent behavioural differences.

TL;DR: The ability to use the beak in a greater range of ways, and more flexibly, was highly repeatable in Indian mynas, and underpinned their superior problem-solving performance, and helped facilitate innovation not only in less competitive individuals, as is documented in the literature, but also in species with less competitive lifestyles.

TL;DR: The influence of majority influence on individuals' learning and decision making has received ample attention in the scientific community as discussed by the authors, with the former group of scholars aiming at understanding the workings of specific social influences (e.g. Asch, 1956; Sherif, 1936), the latter interested in exploring evolutionarily stable strategies explaining the emergence and persistence of cultural diversity.

TL;DR: Research demonstrating key aspects of complex decision making in non-neuronal organisms when utilizing adaptive search strategies when foraging, choosing between resources and environmental conditions that have several contradictory attributes and necessitate a trade-off is reviewed.

TL;DR: This study investigated the selection of hammers used for cracking Coula nuts by wild chimpanzees in the Tai National Park, Cote d'Ivoire, taking account of the availability of potential tools at the site and time of tool selection, and found that chimpanzees took account of several variables at the same time when selecting nut-cracking tools.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the effects of the presence of a social partner on the expression of individual behaviour in Erythrura gouldiae, and find that bolder individuals were less plastic in their responses.

TL;DR: It is found that desert ants seem to be able to use odour information to follow routes, and may use environmental odours as olfactory landmarks when following habitual routes.