Human activities worldwide are increasingly releasing low-frequency noise into the environment. Anthropogenic noise imposes a novel stress for wild animals and has become an increasing global concern. Many animals have been found to mitigate noise disturbance by modifying their acoustic parameters, yet the calling behaviours of species that breed near airports have not been explored in detail, especially for amphibians. Here, we measured the environmental noise of a swamp close to the runway at ...
The degree to which miniature-brained insects make individual adjustments in response to changing conditions remains unclear. Honey bees, Apis mellifera, are an important insect model and have been shown to make individual speed–accuracy trade-offs, but it is currently not known whether they can adjust speed–accuracy strategies to solve tasks in dynamic ecological contexts. Further, it is unclear how they may behave when facing unsolvable or impossible tasks. We therefore tested whether honey be...
Last. Richard A. Phillips(NERC: Natural Environment Research Council)H-Index: 71
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Foraging site selection and site fidelity can have implications for many ecological processes. The degree of site fidelity differs greatly not just between species but also within populations. Some of this variation may be explained by a win-stay–lose-shift (WSLS) strategy, where an individual returns to its most recent foraging area only if the previous visit was profitable. However, the use and adaptive value of this strategy have mostly been tested in captivity, largely because of the difficu...
Last. Alex Jordan(MPG: Max Planck Society)H-Index: 7
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Parental care can be associated with novel or altered social relationships with conspecifics, yet little is known about how the broader structure of the social environment is modulated by individuals caring for dependent offspring. Here, we compared the social environments of breeding groups in which dependent offspring were either present or absent. We conducted a field study with Neolamprologus multifasciatus, a group-living cichlid fish endemic to Lake Tanganyika, in which females provide dir...
Animals living near urban habitats face many pressures linked with human disturbance. While individuals vary in their ability to cope with disturbance, it is predicted that individuals in highly disturbed environments will be bolder and more aggressive than those in less disturbed environments. Using little penguins, Eudyptula minor, we investigated whether individual aggressiveness was consistent across trials and whether aggressiveness was greater in colonies that experience higher levels of u...
Last. Cibele Biondo(UFABC: Universidade Federal do ABC)H-Index: 6
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Social selection, via intra- and intersexual competition for sexual (e.g. mates) and/or nonsexual (e.g. territories) resources, is thought to drive the evolution of ornaments in both sexes. However, the relative importance of intra- and intersexual competition in promoting the evolution of female and male ornamentation and, hence, sexual dichromatism remains poorly understood. We addressed this issue in antbirds (Thamnophilidae), a radiation of sexually dichromatic passerines wherein eumelanic p...
Behaviours that are consistent across contexts (also known as behavioural syndromes) can have evolutionary implications, but their role in scenarios where the sexes conflict, such as sexual cannibalism, is poorly understood. While some research has focused on aggressive personality in females and its role in determining cannibalistic attack, effects of male personality have rarely been explored. Male activity as a personality trait could be an important mediator of sexual cannibalism if it modul...
Sexual coercion is widespread in the animal kingdom. Its direct forms, including harassment and forced copulation, have largely been investigated as an expression of (alternative) male reproductive strategies, rather than the result of a sexual conflict between the sexes. Likewise, the frequent occurrence of forced copulations in orang-utans (Pongo spp.) has been attributed to male strategies and more recently also to concealed female fecundity. So far, however, the immediate contextual variable...
Animals that hunt for food underwater and return to the surface for air (‘divers’) are limited by their ability to store oxygen. The aerobic dive limit (ADL) is the dive duration at which all the possible oxygen stores have been used. It has been claimed that models of optimal diving predict that divers will be close to this limit and that the data do not match this prediction. I characterize closeness to the ADL by the fraction null null null null ψ null null null null of the maximum amount of ...
Ringing is one of the most commonly used techniques to monitor bird individuals and collect data on various aspects of their life history. However, this method involves practices (capturing and handling) that might affect individuals' behaviour. Wild animals can remember and learn from previous experiences, and, thus, they anticipate risks and modify their response in subsequent similar situations. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the long-term effects of playback-associated mist netting on t...
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