Posts tagged animal behavior
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Photographer Volker Gutgessell has spent the last four years visiting Frankfurt Zoo capturing these sensitive images of bonobos, gorillas and orangutans. Standing for several hours a day, the 58-year-old has documented the behaviours and expressions of his subjects - despite suffering chronic back pain caused by a severe slipped disc. Volker also developed tinnitus as a result of his injury, causing a constant ringing in his ears. But despite his condition, he has found a way of communicating through his pictures and picks up on the body language of his ape “models” while shooting them.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Crowdsourcing insects rely on their collective brain power
When ants are confronted with information overload and face too many decisions — about where to live, for instance — they revert to the wisdom of the crowd.
Despite having a brain smaller than the point of a pin, one ant species uses an elaborate system of sending out scouts to look for new homes. The scouts report back, and then the whole colony votes, according to researchers at Arizona State University.
The ants use chemistry and crowdsourcing, wrote associate professor of biology Stephen C. Pratt and graduate student Takao Sasaki at Arizona State University, in the current issue of Current Biology.
"They have tiny brains, but nonetheless, they are able to do quite a bit with them," Pratt said. Honey bees also have small brains but each brain has about a million neurons, which collectively have "quite a lot of processing power." Bees use a tail-wagging dance to communicate.
The ants involved in the ASU study, Temnothorax rugatulus are red, about one-tenth of an inch long, and live in crevices between rocks in forests in the western U.S. and parts of Europe.
Virtual reality ‘beaming’ technology transforms human-animal interaction
Using cutting-edge virtual reality technology, researchers have ‘beamed’ a person into a rat facility allowing the rat and human to interact with each other on the same scale.
Published in PLOS ONE, the research enables the rat to interact with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human participant in a different location. At the same time, the human participant (who is in a virtual environment) interacts with a human-sized avatar that is controlled by the movements of the distant rat. The authors hope the new technology will be used to study animal behaviour in a completely new way.
Computer scientists at UCL and the University of Barcelona have been working on the idea of ‘beaming’ for some time now, having last year digitally beamed a scientist in Barcelona to London to be interviewed by a journalist.
The researchers define ‘beaming’ as digitally transporting a representation of yourself to a distant place, where you can interact with the people there as if you were there. This is achieved through a combination of virtual reality and teleoperator systems. The visitor to the remote place (the destination) is represented there ideally by a physical robot.
New studies reveal connections between animals’ microbial communities and behavior
New research is revealing surprising connections between animal microbiomes—the communities of microbes that live inside animals’ bodies—and animal behavior, according to a paper by University of Georgia ecologist Vanessa O. Ezenwa and her colleagues. The article, just published in the Perspectives section of the journal Science, reviews recent developments in this emerging research area and offers questions for future investigation.
The paper grew out of a National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop on new ways to approach the study of animal behavior. Ezenwa, an associate professor in the UGA Odum School of Ecology and College of Veterinary Medicine department of infectious diseases, and her coauthors were interested in the relationship between animal behavior and beneficial microbes.
Most research on the interactions between microbes and their animal hosts has focused on pathogens, Ezenwa said. Less is known about beneficial microbes or animal microbiomes, but several recent studies have begun to explore these connections.
"We know that animal behavior plays a critical role in establishing microbiomes," she said. "Once they’re established, the microbiomes then influence animal behavior in lots of ways that have far-reaching consequences. That’s what we were trying to highlight in this article."
(Image credit: sankax)
Study finds that like human children, vervet monkeys learn by copying others
The new study, by Professor Andrew Whiten and Dr Erica van de Waal, shows that vervet monkeys learn by copying others in their group, as human children do.
The research found that monkeys were able to discover new techniques for obtaining food by mimicking the behaviour of others within their group. Not only that, but the same techniques then spread to other group members in the same way.
In four different groups, three different techniques spread, supporting the theory that these methods were passed on rather than learned individually.
The researchers believe vervet monkeys, like human children, are shaped by copying others and in this way come to be members of their cultural group.
Professor Whiten, Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, commented, “Our research is revealing that primates other than humans share some of our own reliance on doing as others do in our group.”
Light on the Brain
By Sabrina Richards | September 20, 2012
Researchers find that photoreceptors expressed in zebrafish hypothalamus contribute to light-dependent behavior.
Juvenile zebrafish.
Zebrafish larvae without eyes or pineal glands can still respond to light using photopigments located deep within their brains. Published in Current Biology, the findings are the first to link opsins, photoreceptors located in the hypothalamus and other brain areas, to increased swimming in response to darkness, a behavior researchers hypothesize may help the fish move toward better-lit environments.
“[It’s a] strong demonstration that opsin-dependent photoreceptors in deep brain areas affect behaviors,” said Samer Hattar, who studies light reception in mammals at Johns Hopkins University but did not participate in the research.
Photoreceptors in eyes enable vision, and photoreceptors in the pineal gland, a small endocrine gland located in the center of the vertebrate brain, regulate circadian rhythms. But photoreceptors are also found in other brain areas of both invertebrates and vertebrate lineages. The function of these extraocular photoreceptors has been best studied in birds, where they regulate seasonal reproduction, explained Harold Burgess, a behavioral neurogeneticist at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.
Many opsins have been reported in the brains of tiny and transparent larval zebrafish, raising the possibility that light could be stimulating the photoreceptors even deep in the brain. To test for behaviors that may be regulated by deep brain photoreceptors, Burgess and his colleagues in Wolfgang Driever’s lab at the University of Freiburg removed the eyes of zebrafish larvae, and compared their behavior to larvae that retained their eyes. Although most light-dependent behavior required eyes, the eyeless larvae did respond when the lights were turned off, increasing their activity for a several minutes, though to a somewhat lesser extent than control larvae. But the fact that they responded at all suggests that non-retinal photoreceptors contributed to the behavior.
To confirm the role of the deep brain photoreceptors, the researchers also tested eyeless larvae that had been genetically modified to block expression of photoreceptors in the pineal gland. This fish still showed this jump in activity for several minutes after entering darkness.
Two different types of opsins—melanopsin and multiple tissue opsin—are expressed in the same type of neuron in zebrafish hypothalamus. Burgess and his colleagues looked at zebrafish missing the transcription factor Orthopedia, which is unique to these neurons, and found that the darkness-induced activity boost is nearly absent in these fish. To further narrow the search for the responsible photoreceptors, the researchers overexpressed melanopsin in hypothalamus neurons that co-express Orthopedia and melanopsin, and found that it increased the sensitivity of eyeless zebrafish to reductions in light. The results point to both melanopsin and Orthopedia as key players in modulating this behavior and pinpoint the location to neurons that coexpress these factors in the zebrafish hypothalamus.
Interestingly, the hypothalamus is one of the oldest parts of the vertebrate brain, said Detlev Arendt, a developmental biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. “It’s very possible that this is one of the oldest functions”—one that evolved in “non-visual organisms” that had no eyes but still needed to sense light.
Although not as directed and efficient as eye-dependent behaviors that help fish swim toward light, Burgess speculates that deep brain opsins can still benefit zebrafish larvae. “You could imagine situation where it can’t see light, if a leaf falls on it and it doesn’t know where to swim. I think this behavior puts it in a hyperactive state where it swims wildly for several minutes until it reaches enough light for eyes to take over,” he explained, noting that such behavior is common in invertebrates.
It remains to be seen whether these deep brain opsins regulate other behaviors, perhaps in similar fashion to seasonal hormonal regulation in birds, but Hattar believes it is likely. “It’s beyond reasonable doubt there are many functions for these deep brain photoreceptors.”
(Source: the-scientist.com)
Worker honeybees shuttling between foraging and nursing tasks have been found to switch huge groups of genes on and off in their brains for each job. This shows for the first time that different behaviours can have specific gene patterns. The discovery could have implications for how our own behaviour influences which genes are switched on in our brains and bodies.
In a study published in The American Naturalist, a group of scientists led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have used a technique developed to study human consumer choices to investigate what influences a baboon’s foraging decisions. The technique, known as discrete choice modelling, has rarely been used before in animal behaviour research. It showed how baboons not only consider many social and non-social factors when making foraging decisions, but also how they change these factors depending on their habitat and their own social traits.
These chimp handshakes, which are seen only among some of the primates, seem to differ from group to group in ways that aren’t dependent on genetics or environment. That leaves cultural differences between groups as a possible explanation for why and how the hand-holding occurs.
(Source: livescience.com)
In a new study, scientists at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID) at UW-Madison develop a computational approach to determine whether individuals behave predictably. With data from previous fights, the team looked at how much memory individuals in the group would need to make predictions themselves. The analysis proposes a novel estimate of “cognitive burden,” or the minimal amount of information an organism needs to remember to make a prediction.
The research draws from a concept called “sparse coding,” or the brain’s tendency to use fewer visual details and a small number of neurons to stow an image or scene. Previous studies support the idea that neurons in the brain react to a few large details such as the lines, edges and orientations within images rather than many smaller details.
"So what you get is a model where you have to remember fewer things but you still get very high predictive power — that’s what we’re interested in," says Bryan Daniels, a WID researcher who led the study.