CAMILA P. TEIXEIRA*, CRISTIANO SCHETINI DE AZEVEDO*†, MIKE MENDL‡, CYNTHIA F. CIPRESTE† & ROBERT J. YOUNG* *Conservation, Ecology and Animal Behaviour Group, Mestrado em Zoologia, Pontifíca Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais †Fundação Zoo-Botânica Av. Otacílio Negrão de Lima ‡Centre for Behavioural Biology, Department of Clinical Veterinary Science, University of Bristol
In this article we discuss why programmes that release animals back to the wild frequency meet with failure. Specifically, we analyse the role of stress in the fail of animal translocations and reintroductions. Our analysis shows that stress is a poorly understood phenomenon by conservation biologists; for example, few understand that the effects of stress can be accumulative or additive. While the adverse effects of stress on animal health and well-being are known, its adverse effects on important cognitive abilities, such as memory, learning and attention are relatively unknown by conservation biologists. We conclude by making a plea for a greater interchange of information between animal welfare scientists and conservation scientists.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.06.002
BENNETT G. GALEF JR, SHANNON PRETTY & ELAINE E. WHISKIN Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
It has long been known that rats mark foods and feeding sites that they are exploiting with residual cues that make those sites more attractive to other rats than unmarked foods and feeding sites. In the present series of experiments, we asked whether rats that had learned to avoid a food because they had become ill after eating it would mark that food in a way that caused other rats to avoid eating it. Somewhat surprisingly we found that residual cues left by rats in and around a food that they were avoiding eating, were just as attractive to other rats as cues deposited by rats that were eating the same food. Why rats do not seem to be able to signal their fellows to avoid an unprofitable potential feeding site, whereas other species can remains to be determined.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.05.009
ANDREW M. TURNER, SARAH E. TURNER & HEIDI LAPPI Department of Biology, Clarion University
A number of recent studies show that animals have an impressive ability to detect and avoid predators. The ability to detect predators and employ an appropriate behavioural defense may be innate or it may be learned, but for most taxa the role of experience in shaping predator avoidance behavior is not known. We assessed whether perception of predation risk and choice of defensive strategies by the snail Physa acuta is influenced by experience by performing three experiments in which we manipulated exposure to predators and then assayed behavioural responses to predator cues. Snails responded to both fish and crayfish predators, but the defensive strategy depended on prior exposure to predators, showing that learning plays some role in shaping anti-predator behavior. Overall, however, the effects of experience were small relative to the overall effects of predator cues on snail habitat use, showing that the anti-predator responses of P. acuta are largely innate.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.05.010
ANN V. HEDRICK1 & RAINE KORTET1,2 1Section of Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior, University of California, Davis, U.S.A. 2Integrative Ecology Unit, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 65 (Viikinkaari 1), FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
Despite evidence that predators and parasites influence the evolution of songs in crickets, less is known about the influence of predators and parasites on their hiding behaviour. However, crickets differ in the amount of time spent hiding in refuges. We studied the hiding behaviour of crickets from two populations that differ in predation and parasitism. We tethered crickets overnight in both habitats and found that more crickets were eaten in Arizona than in California. We also found more parasitic flies in Arizona than in California. These flies are attracted to male songs and lay their maggots on male crickets. The maggots burrow into the crickets, feed on their tissues, and eventually kill them. In the laboratory, male Arizona crickets hid longer in a novel environment than male California crickets. Our results suggest that hiding times of crickets are shaped by natural selection acting through predation and/or parasitism.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.03.018
STEPHEN T. TRUMBO Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut
There are few behaviors for which our perspective has changed so much as for infanticide. Although biologists today accept infanticide as adaptive, there is disagreement in many cases over the causes of infanticide. This study of burying beetles investigated two causes of infanticide, resource competition and sexual selection. When the potentially infanticidal intruder was of a different species, only resource competition was important. When the intruder was of the same species but of opposite sex there was a possibility of sexual selection as well. In sexually selected infanticide, the intruder will kill the resident’s offspring and then pair with the resident to produce a replacement brood. Where both resource competition and sexual selection were operating in burying beetles, infanticide was more common. It is hypothesized that the ability to produce a replacement brood with the intruder reduces the motivation to protect the young and leads to a higher incidence of infanticide.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.05.004
BENNETT G. GALEF JR & ELAINE E. WHISKIN Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Ontario
When choosing foods to eat, rats use both information they acquire as a result of their own sampling and evaluation of available alternatives and information they have acquired previously from others. Formal models (and common sense) suggest that, as potential costs of repeated sampling of alternatives for individual evaluation rises (e.g. in the presence of predators or in environments containing poison foods), dependence on socially acquired information should increase. We looked at reliance on socially acquired information by rats choosing between two foods both when predators were either present or absent and when subjects had either learned or not learned that some foods in their environment were toxic. We did not find evidence of enhanced reliance on social learning when individual learning was risky. Rather, presence of predators decreased the choosiness of subjects and presence of poison foods had no effect on their use of socially acquired information.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.05.003
CHARLES SONTAG, DAVID SLOAN WILSON & R. STIMSON WILCOX Department of Biological Sciences, Binghamton University
Animals can find food using information from the food itself or from others that are also looking for food. Social information about food can be actively communicated or based on unavoidable by-products of feeding activities. We present three experiments that explore the relative importance of odour gradients and social information as Bufo americanus tadpoles locate food sources. In the first experiment, tadpoles quickly found food and chose the better quality of two food patches spaced 15 cm apart in the field. In a second experiment, the initial presence of tadpoles on one food patch attracted more tadpoles for a period of an hour, compared to an identical food patch without tadpoles spaced 114 cm apart. In a third experiment, the time required to initial contact with a single food patch did not change over a 16-fold range of food concentration, suggesting that B. americanus tadpoles have a limited ability to locate food from a distance using information from the food itself. However, larger groups were able to locate this resource faster, suggesting that the tadpoles were using information from others. Finding food and discriminating food patch quality from a distance is probably a major adaptive advantage of sociality in B. americanus tadpoles, although the presence or absence of active signalling remains to be determined.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.05.006
LARS BEJDERa*, AMY SAMUELSb, HAL WHITEHEADa & NICK GALESc aBiology Department, Dalhousie University, Canada bBiology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MA, USA cAustralian Antarctic Division, Tasmania, Australia
We conducted experimental vessel approaches to bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, to understand effects of vessel traffic on dolphin behaviour. We found that when the vessel was nearby, the dolphins’ swimming patterns became more erratic, their groups became more compact, and group membership was more changeable. We observed these responses in regions of both high and low vessel traffic, but dolphins living with low vessel traffic had responses that were stronger and longer lasting. The less dramatic responses of dolphins in a region of high vessel traffic would typically be taken to mean that they had become accustomed to vessel activity. However, another study – showing that dolphin-watching tourism in Shark Bay contributed to declining dolphin numbers in the region of high vessel traffic (Bejder et al. in press, Conservation Biology) – led us to conclude that we documented moderated responses to vessels because the dolphins sensitive to vessel disturbance had left the region of high vessel traffic before our study began. From this, we concluded that behavioural responses may not be reliable indicators of the effects of human disturbance on wildlife.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.04.003
J. ALAN CLARK, P. DEE BOERSMA & DAWN M. OLMSTED Department of Biology, University of Washington
We explored individual recognition and call discrimination in Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) through several playback experiments and demonstrate that both adults and chicks can discriminate between calls. We played male ecstatic display calls to incubating females and, later, their mates. Females responded more strongly to their mate’s calls than to calls of neighbours and strangers. Males, however, responded similarly to their own calls and those of neighbours and strangers. We also played mutual display calls to pair members during incubation and, later, to their unattended chicks. Adults responded more strongly to their own call than that of a stranger pair. Chicks responded more strongly to their parent’s calls than to strangers’ calls. We found several factors that correlated strongly with response strength: longer-mated females responded less strongly to their mate’s call, males responded more strongly later in the season, and chicks responded less strongly at higher temperatures.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.04.002
REUVEN DUKAS1, COLIN W. CLARK2 & KEVIN ABBOTT1 1Animal Behaviour Group, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4K1, Canada2Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z2, Canada
Research in the past few decades has established that insects rely heavily on learning for a variety of tasks. Recently, it has also been documented that male and female insects learn in the context of sexual behaviour. These findings challenge the traditional views that male insects are either indiscriminate or rely on genetically programmed rules for courtship. It is not intuitively clear when male insects can benefit from learning in the context of courtship. Hence we investigated the conditions favouring learning during courtship in insects by using a model that compared a learning strategy to two alternatives, indiscriminate courtship, which means courting all females encountered, and innate selectivity, implying the adoption of a fixed criterion above which females are courted. Our model identifies the settings under which learning during courtship is most likely to evolve.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.05.002
Richard McElreath* & Pontus Strimling† *Department of Anthropology and Graduate Groups in Ecology, Animal Behavior and Population Biology, University of California, Davis, U.S.A. †Department of Mathematics and Physics, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden
Individual animals sometimes differ across many different contexts of behaviour. There are individuals who behave boldly and others who behave shyly, whether in conflict over food, search for mates, or territory defense. These differences are puzzling, because in many cases it seems an individual would do better to remain entirely flexible across situations. Why should any animal display "personality"? This paper explores the logic of a model in which personality types arise because (1) there is uncertainty about which context an individual is in and (2) there are subtle differences in physical state or experience among individuals that make some situations more profitable or dangerous. As a result, the best thing to do may be to behave inflexibly and in a way that maximizes each individual's own payoffs.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.04.001
JOËLLE TAILLON & STEEVE D. CÔTÉ NSERC-Produits forestiers Anticosti Industrial Research Chair, Département de biologie and Centre d’études nordiques, Université Laval, Québec, QC Canada
The social organization of many animals is based on dominance behaviours. Initial encounters between any two individuals can be crucial in determining the dominance relationship that will prevail between them throughout their lifetime. Achieving a high dominance status can be critical when competition for limited resources is intense. The mechanisms that prevail for the establishment and stability of dominance relationships between individuals are, however, poorly understood. Our study aims to identify factors influencing the establishment of dominance relationships between young individuals, using white-tailed deer fawns as a model species, and to evaluate the possibility of long-term individual recognition after temporal separation. We found that social rank is established during the first encounters between individuals based on differences in body mass and maintained afterwards even when the differences in mass between individuals are reversed. Dyadic dominance relationships seem to be established early in life and may then endure into adulthood.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.03.016
Gerald Borgia1 & Jason Keagy1,2 1Department of Biology, and 2Behavior, Ecology, Evolution and Systematics Program, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
A recent version of the sensory drive hypothesis claims that female food colour preferences have driven the evolution of female preferences for the colour of male display traits. This hypothesis predicts a positive correlation between male display and food colour preferences. We found that male and female satin bowerbirds preferentially use long wavelength colours as food items. Male decoration preferences were biased toward short wave length colours and negatively correlated with food colour preferences. Our reconstruction of ancestral character states is most consistent with the hypothesis that the original bower decorations were inedible objects and were thus unlikely to have been dual use traits that also functioned as food items. Our results do not support the hypothesis that food colour preferences have driven the evolution of bower decoration colour preferences nor that sensory drive has caused similar food and decoration preferences, and suggest that different factors have shaped female preferences for male display and food colour preferences in bowerbirds.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.03.015
VILIS O. NAMS Department of Environmental Sciences, NSAC, Canada
It is easy to test whether an animal orients towards a distant goal, if you know what the goal is. E.g. homing pigeons are supposed to be flying to their home loft, and thus you can easily test how well they do so. But if an animal simply travels in a straight path, how do you know if that animal is travelling towards a distant goal? I discovered how to test for this; it is based on a known method of testing for random travel. Animals use many types of mechanisms for determing where they go - e.g. weasels tend to alternate turns and foxes walk towards interesting odours. I show that if you zoom out when viewing animal paths then all of the different movement mechanisms sort themselves out to only two types - orientation versus random movement. Then one simply tests for the presence of the random movement.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.04.005
T. Fuchs*, A. Haney*, T.J. Jechura†, F.R. Moore‡ & V.P. Bingman* *J. P. Scott Center for Neuroscience Mind and Behavior and Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, U.S.A. †Albion College, Albion, Michigan, U.S.A. ‡University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, U.S.A.
Many species of typically diurnal songbirds experience dramatic sleep loss during the migratory seasons because of their nocturnal flights. However, nocturnally migrating songbirds continue to function normally with no observable effect of sleep loss on their behavior. Studying the Swainson’s thrush (Catharus ustulatus), a long-distance trans-gulf migrant, we investigated how nocturnal migrant birds might compensate for sleep loss. We found that in contrast to the non-migratory season, migrating Swainson’s thrushes engage in numerous, brief “daytime naps”, closing either one or both eyes for several seconds. Short “micro naps” may enable migratory birds to compensate for extended periods of nocturnal sleep loss without substantially compromising necessary daytime activities. Because unilateral eye closure in birds is a reliable indicator of unihemispheric sleep, our findings raise the intriguing possibility that nocturnal migrants may in part compensate for nocturnal sleep loss by taking lateralized naps during the day.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.03.008
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