animal behavior

There are a lot of people blogging about their kids. But when Kate writes about parenting issues, it is pure science. After attending a meeting on parental behavior, she's been churning out post after post on this fascinating topic: Cheetah Infidelity and the Bruce EffectBird brains and sex reversalThanks, Dad - the paternal brain and his selfish genesThanks, Dad - footage of a paternal eagle Perhaps there will be more over the next few days, so stay tuned...
When I was a kid I swallowed science-fiction by the crates. And I was too young to be very discerning of quality - I liked everything. Good taste developed later, with age. But even at that tender age, there was one book that was so bad that not only did I realized it was bad, it really, really irked me. It was The Ayes of Texas (check the Amazon readers' reviews!), a stupid 1982 Texas-secessionist fairy-tale in which a rich (and of course brilliant and smooth with ladies) conservative Texan, by throwing millions of dollars at scientists, gets all sorts of new gizmos and gadgets which he…
Tanja was lucky last night. She and her husband were filming bats out in Arizona. At one moment she picked up her cheap camera and aimed it at the sky at just the right moment to catch this picture of a kestrel (Falco sparverius) catching a Mexican Free-tailed Bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) - due to size, under the fold:
As we mentioned just the other day, studying animal behavior is tough as "animals do whatever they darned please". Thus, making sure that everything is controlled for in an experimental setup is of paramount importance. Furthermore, for the studies to be replicable in other labs, it is always a good idea for experimental setups to be standardized. Even that is often not enough. I do not have access to Science but you may all recall a paper from several years ago in which two labs tried to simultaneously perform exactly the same experiment in mice, using all the standard equipment,…
Remember last summer when some guy named Paul Manger wrote a paper asserting how dolphins and other Cetaceans are really quite dumb? There was quite an interesting discussion about it on blogs back then, e.g., here, here, here and here. Now, a formal rebuttal got published in PLoS-Biology: Cetaceans Have Complex Brains for Complex Cognition: The brain of a sperm whale is about 60% larger in absolute mass than that of an elephant. Furthermore, the brains of toothed whales and dolphins are significantly larger than those of any nonhuman primates and are second only to human brains when…
The Fly Spontaneous Behavior paper is generating quite a lot of buzz. Bjorn has collected some of the best blogospheric responses, including these from Mark Chu-Carroll, Mark Hoofnagle and Kate. He also got Slashdotted - of course, whoever posted that on Slashdot failed to a) link to the paper, b) link to the press release and c) link to Bjorn's blog. Instead, a little blurb from one of the worst media articles from MSNBC is the only link. Those got linked later in the comments, so I hope Bjorn enjoys the traffic (it will go away tomorrow never to come back again). Bjorn has also posted…
Google was really no help in finding the exact quote, but everyone in the animal behavior field has heard some version of the Harvard Rule of Animal Behaviour: "You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases." Anyone here knows who actually said that and what were the exact words? Anyway, one way to re-word the "whatever they damned please" is to call it "free will". Björn Brembs says so but apparently not everyone agrees. The discussion in the media and on blogs is just about to start…
Of course, I was not the only one commenting on the recent duck phallus paper. You should check out the other blogospheric responses, e.g., by Carl, PZ, RPM, Grrrl, Laelaps, Neil, Belle, Zuzu, Guru and many others. Unfortunately, most people link only to each other, or to the press release, or to the NYTimes article. The articles are fine, but they are simplified for the mass audience. If you are a scientist, you should read the original paper to get all the details. Furthermore, many commenters on blogs have asked some very good questions about the research which remained unanswered, e.…
...because weird sex does not only happen on Fridays.... Remember this? Many have asked themselves (I did) where does it go, i.e., what kind of female genital tract can accomodate such a large penis. But one person actually did not stop at wondering but set out to find out. You can find out who and how and why in Carl Zimmer's today's NYTimes article about today's PLoS-One paper.
Yup, that was going to be the title of this post. I got the paper and was ready to write the post when I noticed that Peter scooped me and posted about the same paper today (yup, there is just not that many cool papers on Charismatic Marine Megavertebrates to spread around this week). I have nothing to add, so just go and see his post: The results demonstrated that a free-ranging whale shark displays ultradian, diel and circa-lunar rhythmicity of diving behaviour. Whale sharks dive to over 979.5 m, making primarily diurnal deep dives and remaining in relatively shallow waters at night.
It is Marine Megavertebrate Week right now, so why not take a look at one of the most Mega of the Megaverts - the grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus): Do whales sleep? You may have heard that dolphins do - one hemisphere at the time, while swimming, and not for very long periods at a time. A combined Russian/US team of researchers published a study in 2000 - to my knowledge the best to date - on sleep-wake and activity patterns of the grey whale: Rest and activity states in a gray whale (pdf) by Lyamin, Manger, Mukhametov, Siegel and Shpak. The whale in the experiment rested in two different…
Sex And Prenatal Hormone Exposure Affect Cognitive Performance: Yerkes researchers are using their findings to better understand sex differences in cognitive performance, which may lead to increased understanding of the difference in neuropsychological disorders men and women experience. In one of the first research studies to assess sex differences in cognitive performance in nonhuman primates, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have found the tendency to use landmarks for navigation is typical only of females. This finding, which corroborates findings in rodents and…
When my 'Scientific American' arrived the other day, I was excited to read the article about ravens by Bernd Heinrich, as I loved his book Mind of a Raven. I was also glad to see that new cool experiments have been done since the book came out. But I wondering how to blog about an article that is behind the subscription wall, so in the end, I abandoned the idea. Now, Grrrlscientist comes to the rescues with an excellent summary of the article, that is well worth your time.
Long time ago, I mentioned here something about the Belgrade Zoo. The power of Google brought a Belgrader, Sonja, to my blog, who alerted me to the dire conditions in which the Zoo is right now and the existence of her website (made by her and her students) called Zoo SOS whose goal is to force the City government of Belgrade to move the Zoo from its present location to a better place outside town (not having to deal with the Animal Rights terrorists there, they must have placed a link to PETA by mistake - they do not know the distinction between Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Update:…
Russ noted that someone is using thermography to study thermoregulation in elephants: Wits University has just completed studies on how elephants cope with high African temperatures and how that influences their behaviour. In African savannahs, elephants are exposed to high environmental heat loads during the day and low ambient temperatures at night and yet these animals are able to cope quite adequately. Animals that run the risk of losing energy by dissipating heat often deal with this via regional heterothermy, i.e., wading birds have cold legs so there is less of a heat loss when they…
We've had a few dogs over the years and housebreaking them was never a big problem. But now we got my mother-in-law's puppy labradoodle - who is a real sweetheart - for a couple of weeks to see if we can housebreak him because she was not successful. My wife turned out to be a better animal psychologist than I am and figured out what the problem is. This is not a case of a little puppy who is not yet housebroken. This is a case of a puppy that was inadvertenly trained to poop inside the house and not outside. What we think happened is either that the dog got yelled at when he soiled the…
Eavesdropping Nuthatches Appear To Understand Chickadees In Distress: If Dr. John Watson had been chronicling the work of Christopher Templeton rather than the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, he might have entitled the latest research by Templeton "The Adventure of the Avian Eavesdroppers." The University of Washington doctoral student has found the first example of an animal making sophisticated decisions about the danger posed by a predator from the information contained in the alarm calls of another species. Grrrrl explains.
Animal Migration: New Technologies, Global Warming Add Impetus To Research: The February 2007 issue of BioScience, the monthly journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), includes a special section on animal migration that features six articles exploring biologists' understanding of this pervasive and vital syndrome. Animal migration fascinated the ancients and continues to fascinate researchers today. An often highly complex, synchronized suite of changes in behavior, morphology, and physiology enables journeys that may be epic in scale. These feats of endurance and…
This is the last in the 16-post series of BIO101 lecture notes for a speed-course targeted at adults. As always, I welcome corrections and suggestions for improvement (June 17, 2006)... -------------------------------------- Last week we looked at the organ systems involved in regulation and control of body functions: the nervous, sensory, endocrine and circadian systems. This week, we will cover the organ systems that are regulated and controlled. Again, we will use the zebra-and-lion example to emphasize the way all organ systems work in concert to maintain the optimal internal…
For Some Species, An Upside To Inbreeding: Although breeding between close kin is thought to be generally unfavorable from an evolutionary standpoint, in part because harmful mutations are more easily propagated through populations in this way, theory predicts that under some circumstances, the benefits of inbreeding may outweigh the costs. Researchers have now reported real-life evidence in support of this theory. Studying an African chiclid fish species, Pelvicachromis taetiatus, in which both parents participate in brood care, the researchers found that individuals preferred mating with…