Search results for "Animal Behaviour"
showing 6 items of 26 documents
Short telomeres drive pessimistic judgement bias in zebrafish.
2021
The role of telomerase reverse transcriptase has been widely investigated in the contexts of ageing and age-related diseases. Interestingly, decreased telomerase activities (and accelerated telomere shortening) have also been reported in patients with emotion-related disorders, opening the possibility for subjective appraisal of stressful stimuli playing a key role in stress-driven telomere shortening. In fact, patients showing a pessimistic judgement bias have shorter telomeres. However, in humans the evidence for this is correlational and the causal directionality between pessimism and telomere shortening has not been established experimentally yet. We have developed and validated a judg…
Bachelor groups form due to individual choices or environmental disrupters in African striped mice
2021
International audience; In several mammal species, bachelor groups occur as a regular life history stage between dispersal and becoming the breeding male of a multi-female group. However, it is rarely investigated how such groups come into existence and how males that choose this strategy differ in life history traits from other males. Males of the socially flexible African striped mouse Rhabdomys pumilio have been historically reported to adopt one of three alternative tactics, i.e., small group-living philopatric males, intermediate solitary living roaming males, or large group-living territorial males. Here, we describe for the first time, bachelors as a fourth male tactic. Using long-te…
Human voice pitch measures are robust across a variety of speech recordings: methodological and theoretical implications
2021
Fundamental frequency ( f o ), perceived as voice pitch, is the most sexually dimorphic, perceptually salient and intensively studied voice parameter in human nonverbal communication. Thousands of studies have linked human f o to biological and social speaker traits and life outcomes, from reproductive to economic. Critically, researchers have used myriad speech stimuli to measure f o and infer its functional relevance, from individual vowels to longer bouts of spontaneous speech. Here, we acoustically analysed f o in nearly 1000 affectively neutral speech utterances (vowels, words, counting, greetings, read paragraphs and free spontaneous speech) produced by the same 154 men and women, ag…
Observed heterospecific clutch size can affect offspring investment decisions.
2011
Optimal investment in offspring is important in maximizing lifetime reproductive success. Yet, very little is known how animals gather and integrate information about environmental factors to fine tune investment. Observing the decisions and success of other individuals, particularly when those individuals initiate breeding earlier, may provide a way for animals to quickly arrive at better breeding investment decisions. Here we show, with a field experiment using artificial nests appearing similar to resident tit nests with completed clutches, that a migratory bird can use the observed high and low clutch size of a resident competing bird species to increase and decrease clutch size and egg…
Deimatism: a neglected component of antipredator defence
2017
Deimatic or ‘startle’ displays cause a receiver to recoil reflexively in response to a sudden change in sensory input. Deimatism is sometimes implicitly treated as a form of aposematism (unprofitability associated with a signal). However, the fundamental difference is, in order to provide protection, deimatism does not require a predator to have any learned or innate aversion. Instead, deimatism can confer a survival advantage by exploiting existing neural mechanisms in a way that releases a reflexive response in the predator. We discuss the differences among deimatism, aposematism, and forms of mimicry, and their ecological and evolutionary implications. We highlight outstanding questions …
La relación con los animales: un nuevo ámbito de la intervención socioeducativa
2014
This article analyses the educational approaches towards the animal-human relationship which have been developed during the last 20 years. The article establishes a chain of states in that relationship and presents the reasons why those states are consecutive or, occasionally, simultaneous. Next, the different European profiles of social educators are reviewed to see which of these are more open towards educational action with animals, something which could be considered a new field for educators if they have adequate professional training. A series of European (and some American) websites are analysed in order to determine their approach towards the human-animal relationship. Although most…