Published in Animal Behaviour
• Pupal cold exposure induces wing melanization and may alter basking behaviour. • Preflight heating rate was not increased by darker wings but was via wing vibrating. • More melanized wings reduced mating success in both sexes and altered space use. • We found no clear thermal advantage of wing melanization but a fitness cost.
Published in Animal Behaviour
• Fighting often involves the repeated performance of agonistic behaviours. • Individuals may vary in how skilfully they perform such behaviours. • We investigate the link between spatial skill and fighting success in hermit crabs. • We find that winners perform rapping behaviour more skilfully than losers. • Our results indicate that skill is tigh...
Published in Animal Behaviour
• We investigated the relationship between group size and innovative behaviour. • Innovative behaviour emerges disproportionately quickly with increasing group size. • Social information use facilitates the transmission of novel behaviour. • These results highlight potential advantages of living in large social groups.
Published in Animal Behaviour
Transmitting information about the location of a predator in social animal species can be seen as an investment in a public good, where information is the resource and group members benefit from reduced fatalities of kin and cooperation partners in their community. As few empirical tests of this idea exist in natural settings, we conducted a field ...
Published in Animal Behaviour
• Responses to drought-exposed host plants are stage dependent. • Drought-exposed host plants reduced survival and body mass of prediapause larvae. • Postdiapause larvae grow faster and become larger on drought-exposed host plants. • Postdiapause larvae prefer host plants that increase their performance. • Mothers prefer plants that increase their ...
Published in Animal Behaviour
Highlights► Alternative mating tactics (AMTs) may entail differential fitness payoffs. ► We explore possible costs associated with AMTs in rutting male chamois. ► Greater mating effort in territorial males linked to greater parasitism. ► Androgens mediate the trade-off between reproductive effort and immune response. ► These results hint at potenti...
Published in Animal Behaviour
•Innovation allows individuals to invent new, beneficial behaviours and pass them on.•Inventions do not always occur, nor are all inventions transmitted and preserved.•We consider mechanisms that may inhibit the invention and spread of new behaviours.•Transmission biases may hinder as well as help transmission and preservation.•Strong predictions a...
Published in Animal Cognition
Psittacines are generally considered to possess cognitive abilities comparable to those of primates. Most psittacine research has evaluated performance on standardized complex cognition tasks, but studies of basic cognitive processes are limited. We tested orange-winged Amazon parrots (Amazona amazonica) on a spatial foraging assessment, the Hamilt...
Published in Animal Behaviour
• In the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola , individuals vary in their boldness. • Extremely bold individuals influence their groups more than shyer individuals. • Colonies with one extreme individual gain more mass and behave more aggressively. • The effect of extreme individuals scales positively to their degree of boldness.
Published in Animal Behaviour
•We explored mechanisms inducing higher production of male parasitoids at low and high temperature.•We compared intended vs secondary sex ratios to discriminate between behavioural change and physiological constraint.•More males emerged at low and high temperature than at intermediary temperature, but the mechanisms differed.•We observed a behaviou...
