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 ► We studied two populations of prairie voles to see what factors influence mating systems. ► Site and sex best explained social monogamy. ► Site, density and sex best predicted the strength of social associations. ► Density best explained the genetic mating system. ► Extrinsic variables affect intraspecific mating systems.
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...
Published in Animal Behaviour
•We developed a new method to study dynamic interactions from tracking data.•The method takes into account serial correlation in relocations.•Using this method, we studied dynamic interactions in 55 free-ranging lions.•One case of avoidance in shared area; others were attraction/independent movements.•Unexpectedly, males tended to move independentl...
