Abstract. Individual feeding success can change with the size of a social group through competition, cooperation, recruitment and other processes. Female s

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Letter, published before Anthony Fauci will appear before Congress, accuses Republicans of ‘waging a war on individual scientists’

At the AOS 2024 annual meeting, fellow ornithologists and I were invited to present academic talks during a female bird symposium organized by Joanna Wu aimed at highlighting recent research on female...

Intergroup conflict is a powerful selective force throughout the animal kingdom. While research has traditionally focused on actions during and after contests, animals also exhibit behavioural flexibility in anticipation of potential intergroup encounters. Synthesising findings from diverse taxa, we describe how social species adjust pre-emptive information gathering, resource use, cohesion, synchrony, and intragroup interactions across a heterogeneous ‘landscape of intergroup conflict’. We show how variation in threat level, driven by spatial context, rival characteristics, and individual motivation, affects these behaviours, and how balancing sensed information and memories of past interactions underlies associated decision-making. Testing the consequences of intergroup pre-emptive behaviour using experimental, technological, and analytical advances will develop understanding of its role in socio-cognitive evolution, population dynamics, and community structure.

Using long-term data from wild dwarf mongooses (Helogale parvula), we demonstrate that on hot days (≥ 35°C) compared to matched cooler ones (≤ 33°C), mongooses emerged and commenced foraging earlier ...

With a team of over 50 people, the different research groups study animal behaviour within the framework of the four questions of Tinbergen, both in the lab and in the field. Current model systems include laboratory studies on zebra finches (

The Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer talks about burnout from covering the pandemic and how bird-watching gave him a new sense of hope.

Antagonistic co-evolution can be asymmetric, where one species lags behind another. Asymmetry in a predator–prey context is expressed by the ‘life–dinner principle’, a classic informal model predictin...

We present MacaqueNet, a global community of macaque researchers who developed the first publicly searchable, standardised database on affiliative and agonistic behaviour. This cross-species database...

White-faced capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica who experienced more intense physiological responses to mild droughts were more fit to survive extreme drought, researchers found in a new UCLA-led study.

In vertebrates, glucocorticoids can be upregulated in response to both psychosocial and energetic stressors, making it difficult to identify the cause of elevated glucocorticoid concentrations when both types of stressors are present. This problem has ...

Pairing a 40-year behavioural dataset with long-term environmental data, we find support for correlations in individual plasticity across behaviours (a) in a free-ranging population of Magellanic pen....

Based on an experiment in Arctic tundra we demonstrate that nest cameras attracted predators, which caused an extremely, positively biased predation rate that was consistent over a range of experimen...