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This article examines the presence of sex bias in the study of squid reproductive strategies, particularly in the field of sexual selection. The author argues that biases towards male-centered perspectives have influenced our understanding of squid reproduction and calls for these biases to be addressed. The article analyzes recent research papers on squid reproduction, revealing a focus on male behavior and a lack of attention to female behavior. The author suggests that recognizing and addressing these biases is crucial for a more accurate understanding of cephalopod reproduction. The text also presents a table of data on various studies conducted on different species of cephalopods, highlighting a bias where males are portrayed as actively engaging in sexual behavior while females are seen as passive recipients. The author argues that this bias may not be representative of all cephalopod species and calls for further research to understand the role of females in these reproductive systems. The author also suggests that acknowledging and addressing biases in research can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of cephalopod behavior. [Extracted from the article]

It is commonly asserted that “death is not a welfare issue” and this has been reflected in welfare legislation and policy in many countries. However, this creates a conflict for many who consider animal welfare to be an appropriate basis for decision-making in animal ethics but also consider that an animal’s death is ethically significant. To reconcile these viewpoints, this paper attempts to formulate an account of death as a welfare issue. Welfare issues are issues that refer to evaluations concerning an animal’s interests. This includes evaluations that refer only to comparisons between the presence and absence of states, including positive states. This means that an animal’s death may be a welfare issue insofar as it leads to the exclusion of relevant positive states. This allows us to deny that death is necessarily not a welfare issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preserved melanin pigments have been discovered in fossilised integumentary appendages of several amniote lineages (fishes, frogs, snakes, marine reptiles, non‐avialan dinosaurs, birds, and mammals) excavated from lagerstätten across the globe. Melanisation is a leading factor in organic integument preservation in these fossils. Melanin in extant vertebrates is typically stored in rod‐ to sphere‐shaped, lysosome‐derived, membrane‐bound vesicles called melanosomes. Black, dark brown, and grey colours are produced by eumelanin, and reddish‐brown colours are produced by phaeomelanin. Specific morphotypes and nanostructural arrangements of melanosomes and their relation to the keratin matrix in integumentary appendages create the so‐called 'structural colours'. Reconstruction of colour patterns in ancient animals has opened an exciting new avenue for studying their life, behaviour and ecology. Modern relationships between the shape, arrangement, and size of avian melanosomes, melanin chemistry, and feather colour have been applied to reconstruct the hues and colour patterns of isolated feathers and plumages of the dinosaurs Anchiornis, Sinosauropteryx, and Microraptor in seminal papers that initiated the field of palaeocolour reconstruction. Since then, further research has identified countershading camouflage patterns, and informed subsequent predictions on the ecology and behaviour of these extinct animals. However, palaeocolour reconstruction remains a nascent field, and current approaches have considerable potential for further refinement, standardisation, and expansion. This includes detailed study of non‐melanic pigments that might be preserved in fossilised integuments. A common issue among existing palaeocolour studies is the lack of contextualisation of different lines of evidence and the wide variety of techniques currently employed. To that end, this review focused on fossil amniotes: (i) produces an overarching framework that appropriately reconstructs palaeocolour by accounting for the chemical signatures of various pigments, morphology and local arrangement of pigment‐bearing vesicles, pigment concentration, macroscopic colour patterns, and taphonomy; (ii) provides background context for the evolution of colour‐producing mechanisms; and (iii) encourages future efforts in palaeocolour reconstructions particularly of less‐studied groups such as non‐dinosaur archosaurs and non‐archosaur amniotes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr. John Hume is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, specializing in the biology and management of lampreys. His research focuses on various aspects of lamprey life cycles, including their development, trophic ecology, and migration patterns. He incorporates approaches from different biological fields, such as chemical communication, animal behavior, and conservation biology. Dr. Hume has published over 25 scientific papers and serves as an Advisory Editor for Environmental Biology of Fishes. He has also reviewed articles for several other journals in the field. [Extracted from the article]

Reviews the book "Deception, Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit," edited by Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson.

The book is a collection of 50 short, independent essays, each one talking about the science behind animal behaviour in about three to five pages. Those who do not like animals should also read this book because it will tell you how the process of evolution has made the world of animals including ourselves so bizarre and amazing, and how scientists discover it. BOOKREVIEW LetUsReadaWonderful Story... * Sujata Deshpande Every Creature Hasa Story: What Science Reveals About Animal Behaviour JanakiLenin HarperCollinsPublishers, India (2020) Pages: 296 (Hardbound) |599/The book Every Creature Has a Story by Janaki Lenin is a delight to those who like animals - you could be a pet parent, a student of animal behaviour, a researcher trying to decipher how animals do what they do and why,oranyonewholovestoknowmoreabout the creatures with whom we share this planet. [Extracted from the article]

Review of New World Primates: Ecology, Evolution and Behavior , edited by Warren G. Kinzey. New York, Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 1997, xvii + 436 pp, cloth $6.95, paper $31.95. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(Informational picture book. 6-8) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book "Hominid Culture in Primate Perspective," edited by Duane Quiatt and Junichiro Itani.

The article reviews the book "Tinbergen's Legacy: Function and Mechanism in Behavioural Biology," by Johan J. Bolhuis and Simon Verlust.

Reviews the book "Outline of Psychology," by William McDougall.

The article reviews the book "Exploring Animal Behavior: Readings From American Scientist," Fifth Edition, edited Paul W. Sherman and John Alcock.

In this way, Ackerman gives us a front row seat on the excitement of behavioral research, and insights into the ways in which the quirky personalities of bird behavior researchers are reflected in their science. Birdsong is repeatedly compared to language, cognitively complex birds are compared to five-year-old human children, and the stealthy sex habits of Arabian babblers are compared to human predilection for sexual privacy. [Extracted from the article]

Review of The Evolving Female: A Life-History Perspective , A. Gallowy, & A.L. Zihlman (Eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, xix + 332 p., tables + figures, $60.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. In addition to the editors, the contributors are L.M. Fedigan, K. Ono, J. Reiter, B.B. Smuts, M. Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, M.S.M. Pavelka, C.M. Pond, R. McFarland, S.M.B. Tarli, E. Repetto, G.A. Morelli, P. Draper, C. Panter-Brick, V.J. Vitzthum, A. Jolly, & B. McLeod. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book "Foraging Theory," by David W. Stephens and John R. Krebs.

Reviews the book 'The Natural History Reader in Animal Behavior,' edited by Howard Topoff.

A review of the book "The Creative Lives of Animals," by Carol Gigliotti, is presented.

The article reviews the book "Comparative Animal Behavior," by Richard A. Maier and Barbara M. Maier.

The varied cognitive abilities and rich adaptive behaviors enabled by the animal nervous system are often described in terms of information processing. This framing raises the issue of how biological neural circuits actually process information, and some of the most fundamental outstanding questions in neuroscience center on understanding the mechanisms of neural information processing. Classical information theory has long been understood to be a natural framework within which information processing can be understood, and recent advances in the field of multivariate information theory offer new insights into the structure of computation in complex systems. In this review, we provide an introduction to the conceptual and practical issues associated with using multivariate information theory to analyze information processing in neural circuits, as well as discussing recent empirical work in this vein. Specifically, we provide an accessible introduction to the partial information decomposition (PID) framework. PID reveals redundant, unique, and synergistic modes by which neurons integrate information from multiple sources. We focus particularly on the synergistic mode, which quantifies the "higher-order" information carried in the patterns of multiple inputs and is not reducible to input from any single source. Recent work in a variety of model systems has revealed that synergistic dynamics are ubiquitous in neural circuitry and show reliable structure–function relationships, emerging disproportionately in neuronal rich clubs, downstream of recurrent connectivity, and in the convergence of correlated activity. We draw on the existing literature on higher-order information dynamics in neuronal networks to illustrate the insights that have been gained by taking an information decomposition perspective on neural activity. Finally, we briefly discuss future promising directions for information decomposition approaches to neuroscience, such as work on behaving animals, multi-target generalizations of PID, and time-resolved local analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide, the persistent trend of human and animal life losses, as well as damage to properties due to wildlife–vehicle collisions (WVCs) remains a significant source of concerns for a broad range of stakeholders. To mitigate their occurrences and impact, many approaches are being adopted, with varying successes. Because of their increased versatility and increasing efficiency, Artificial Intelligence-based methods have been experiencing a significant level of adoption. The present work extensively reviews the literature on intelligent systems incorporating sensor technologies and/or machine learning methods to mitigate WVCs. Included in our review is an investigation of key factors contributing to human–wildlife conflicts, as well as a discussion of dominant state-of-the-art datasets used in the mitigation of WVCs. Our study combines a systematic review with bibliometric analysis. We find that most animal detection systems (excluding autonomous vehicles) are relying neither on state-of-the-art datasets nor on recent breakthrough machine learning approaches. We, therefore, argue that the use of the latest datasets and machine learning techniques will minimize false detection and improve model performance. In addition, the present work covers a comprehensive list of associated challenges ranging from failure to detect hotspot areas to limitations in training datasets. Future research directions identified include the design and development of algorithms for real-time animal detection systems. The latter provides a rationale for the applicability of our proposed solutions, for which we designed a continuous product development lifecycle to determine their feasibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within populations, individuals often show repeatable variation in behaviour, called 'animal personality'. In the last few decades, numerous empirical studies have attempted to elucidate the mechanisms maintaining this variation, such as life‐history trade‐offs. Theory predicts that among‐individual variation in behavioural traits could be maintained if traits that are positively associated with reproduction are simultaneously associated with decreased survival, such that different levels of behavioural expression lead to the same net fitness outcome. However, variation in resource acquisition may also be important in mediating the relationship between individual behaviour and fitness components (survival and reproduction). For example, if certain phenotypes (e.g. dominance or aggressiveness) are associated with higher resource acquisition, those individuals may have both higher reproduction and higher survival, relative to others in the population. When individuals differ in their ability to acquire resources, trade‐offs are only expected to be observed at the within‐individual level (i.e. for a given amount of resource, if an individual increases its allocation to reproduction, it comes at the cost of allocation to survival, and vice versa), while among individuals traits that are associated with increased survival may also be associated with increased reproduction. We performed a systematic review and meta‐analysis, asking: (i) do among‐individual differences in behaviour reflect among‐individual differences in resource acquisition and/or allocation, and (ii) is the relationship between behaviour and fitness affected by the type of behaviour and the testing environment? Our meta‐analysis consisted of 759 estimates from 193 studies. Our meta‐analysis revealed a positive correlation between pairs of estimates using both survival and reproduction as fitness proxies. That is, for a given study, behaviours that were associated with increased reproduction were also associated with increased survival, suggesting that variation in behaviour at the among‐individual level largely reflects differences among individuals in resource acquisition. Furthermore, we found the same positive correlation between pairs of estimates using both survival and reproduction as fitness proxies at the phenotypic level. This is significant because we also demonstrated that these phenotypic correlations primarily reflect within‐individual correlations. Thus, even when accounting for among‐individual differences in resource acquisition, we did not find evidence of trade‐offs at the within‐individual level. Overall, the relationship between behaviour and fitness proxies was not statistically different from zero at the among‐individual, phenotypic, and within‐individual levels; this relationship was not affected by behavioural category nor by the testing condition. Our meta‐analysis highlights that variation in resource acquisition may be more important in driving the relationship between behaviour and fitness than previously thought, including at the within‐individual level. We suggest that this may come about via heterogeneity in resource availability or age‐related effects, with higher resource availability and/or age leading to state‐dependent shifts in behaviour that simultaneously increase both survival and reproduction. We emphasize that future studies examining the mechanisms maintaining behavioural variation in populations should test the link between behavioural expression and resource acquisition – both within and among individuals. Such work will allow the field of animal personality to develop specific predictions regarding the mediating effect of resource acquisition on the fitness consequences of individual behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that men are more variable than women has become embedded into scientific thinking. For mental traits like personality, greater male variability has been partly attributed to biology, underpinned by claims that there is generally greater variation among males than females in non‐human animals due to stronger sexual selection on males. However, evidence for greater male variability is limited to morphological traits, and there is little information regarding sex differences in personality‐like behaviours for non‐human animals. Here, we meta‐analysed sex differences in means and variances for over 2100 effects (204 studies) from 220 species (covering five broad taxonomic groups) across five personality traits: boldness, aggression, activity, sociality and exploration. We also tested if sexual size dimorphism, a proxy for sex‐specific sexual selection, explains variation in the magnitude of sex differences in personality. We found no significant differences in personality between the sexes. In addition, sexual size dimorphism did not explain variation in the magnitude of the observed sex differences in the mean or variance in personality for any taxonomic group. In sum, we find no evidence for widespread sex differences in variability in non‐human animal personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity, the interaction between electrically charged objects, is widely known to be fundamental to the functioning of living systems. However, this appreciation has largely been restricted to the scale of atoms, molecules, and cells. By contrast, the role of electricity at the ecological scale has historically been largely neglected, characterised by punctuated islands of research infrequently connected to one another. Recently, however, an understanding of the ubiquity of electrical forces within the natural environment has begun to grow, along with a realisation of the multitude of ecological interactions that these forces may influence. Herein, we provide the first comprehensive collation and synthesis of research in this emerging field of electric ecology. This includes assessments of the role electricity plays in the natural ecology of predator–prey interactions, pollination, and animal dispersal, among many others, as well as the impact of anthropogenic activity on these systems. A detailed introduction to the ecology and physiology of electroreception – the biological detection of ecologically relevant electric fields – is also provided. Further to this, we suggest avenues for future research that show particular promise, most notably those investigating the recently discovered sense of aerial electroreception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book 'Comparative Ecology and Behaviour of Primates,' edited by R.P. Michael and J.H. Crook.

Astrocytes are recognized as more important cells than historically thought in synaptic function through the reciprocal exchange of signaling with the neuronal synaptic elements. The idea that astrocytes are active elements in synaptic physiology is conceptualized in the Tripartite Synapse concept. This review article presents and discusses recent representative examples that highlight the heterogeneity of signaling in tripartite synapse function and its consequences on neural network function and animal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book "Comparative Behavior of Africa Monkeys," edited by Evan L. Zucker.

Reviews the book "Portraits in the Wild: Animal Behavior in East Africa," Second Edition, by Cynthia Moss.

Reviews the book 'Eat or be Eaten.'

If you are interested in the foraging of animals in situations where one forager can affect another (i.e. most ecological situations), then this book is very much worth buying. The authors lay out a theoretical framework which for the first time allows conceptual integration of ecological questions that have traditionally not been seen as linked, such as risk sensitivity, the producer—scrounger model and the ideal free distribution. This framework is so useful and insightful that I expect it to be very widely used. I find it hard to imagine how the authors of any future paper published on the foraging of animals in groups could get away with not citing this work. I think it will become a classic text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal behaviour can lead to varying levels of risk, and an individual's physical condition can alter the potential costs and benefits of undertaking risky behaviours. How risk‐taking behaviour depends on condition is subject to contrasting hypotheses. The asset protection principle proposes that individuals in better condition should be more risk averse, as they have higher future reproductive potential (i.e. more to lose). The state‐dependent safety hypothesis proposes that high‐condition individuals that are more likely to survive and maximise the benefits of risky situations may make apparently riskier choices, as their individual risk is in fact lower. We systematically searched for studies that experimentally manipulated animals' nutritional or energetic condition through diet treatments, and subsequently measured risk‐taking behaviour in contexts relating to predation, novelty and exploration. Our meta‐analysis quantified condition effects on risk‐taking behaviour at both the mean and variance level. We preregistered our methods and hypotheses prior to conducting the study. Phylogenetic multilevel meta‐analysis revealed that the lower‐nutritional‐condition individuals showed on average ca. 26% greater tendency towards risk than high‐condition individuals (95% confidence interval: 15–38%; N = 126 studies, 1297 effect sizes). Meta‐regressions revealed several factors influencing the overall effect, such as the experimental context used to measure risk‐taking behaviour, and the life stage when condition was manipulated. Meta‐analysis of variance revealed no clear overall effect of condition on behavioural variance (on average ca. 3% decrease in variance in low‐ versus high‐condition groups; 95% confidence interval: −8 to 3%; N = 119 studies, 1235 effect sizes), however, the experimental context was an important factor influencing the strength and direction of the variance effect. Our comprehensive systematic review and meta‐analysis provide insights into the roles of state dependency and plasticity in intraspecific behavioural variation. While heterogeneity among effect sizes was high, our results show that poor nutritional state on average increases risk taking in ecological contexts involving predation, novelty and exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I would recommend this book to postgraduate students, including honours students who intend to publish, and early career researchers. Paperback, AUD $35.00, ISBN 9781486311477 David Lindsay is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia where he researched and taught in animal biology and behaviour, for 33 years. The educative value of this book lies predominately in helping postgraduates and early career researchers to write their papers and to write them clearly. [Extracted from the article]

A medley of anecdotes about animal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Killing and policing often occur in the name of care, when, for example, animals display putative signs of illness whose contagiousness is exacerbated by a captive environment, or when animal control decides a (often low-income) household has "too many" animals. This regulation includes the number of animals permitted at one address, whether guardians can let animals roam freely, and acceptable noises and odors from animals. Simultaneously, humans at PAW disavow the structural conditions for animal precarity by blaming what Guenther calls "the myth of the irresponsible owner", for animal suffering and death. [Extracted from the article]

The red nucleus (RN) is a large subcortical structure located in the ventral midbrain. Although it originated as a primitive relay between the cerebellum and the spinal cord, during its phylogenesis the RN shows a progressive segregation between a magnocellular part, involved in the rubrospinal system, and a parvocellular part, involved in the olivocerebellar system. Despite exhibiting distinct evolutionary trajectories, these two regions are strictly tied together and play a prominent role in motor and non-motor behavior in different animal species. However, little is known about their function in the human brain. This lack of knowledge may have been conditioned both by the notable differences between human and non-human RN and by inherent difficulties in studying this structure directly in the human brain, leading to a general decrease of interest in the last decades. In the present review, we identify the crucial issues in the current knowledge and summarize the results of several decades of research about the RN, ranging from animal models to human diseases. Connecting the dots between morphology, experimental physiology and neuroimaging, we try to draw a comprehensive overview on RN functional anatomy and bridge the gap between basic and translational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews and notices are provided on 23 books, published over the years 2017–2020. These are concerned with diverse aspects of biodiversity and conservation, including historical works on different types of institutions, climate change and palaeobiology, global health and sustainability, ecology, restoration, community involvement, animal behaviour, utilization, and regional studies. This is the eighth of a series of cumulative book reviews and notices, based on works submitted by the publishers, which generally appear annually in the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are biological and environmental factors which lead to stereotypic behaviour in humans and animals. Abnormal, functionless repetitive behaviour may have a genetic or epigenetic background; however, in the case of farm animals it is often linked with maintenance in a barren environment. Stereotypies have been considered as an indicator of poor welfare. They may occur in chronic stress situations as an animal's way of coping. Stereotypies are often noticed in cattle, pigs and horses kept individually. This form of behaviour is generally associated with the situation when an animal cannot satisfy its natural needs. Taking into consideration the currently increasing concern about maintaining proper husbandry conditions, especially in intensive breeding systems, the environmental improvement has become an important issue. The objective of this review is to present a characteristic of stereotypies in cattle, pigs and horses and to show various methods of reducing the frequency of this behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of innovation in non‐human animals (henceforth: animals) has recently gained momentum across fields including primatology, animal behaviour and cultural evolution. Examining the rate of innovations, and the cognitive mechanisms driving these innovations across species, can provide insights into the evolution of human culture. Especially relevant to the study of human culture is one of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Both wild and captive chimpanzees demonstrate an impressive ability to innovate solutions to novel problems, but also a striking level of conservatism in some contexts, creating a unique and at times puzzling, picture of animal innovation. Whilst the animal innovation field is rife with potential for expanding our knowledge of human and non‐human cognition and problem‐solving, it is undermined by a lack of consistency across studies. The field is yet to settle on a definition of the term 'innovation', leading to studies being incomparable across and even within the same species. Here, we fill two gaps in the literature. First, we discuss some of the most prevalent definitions of 'innovation' from different fields, highlighting similarities and differences between them. Secondly, we provide an up‐to‐date review of accounts of innovations in both wild and captive chimpanzees. We hope this review will provide a resource for researchers interested in the study of innovation in chimpanzees and other animals, as well as emphasising the need for consistency in the way in which innovations are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon reading I Wildhood i anyone who believes that human teenagers are animals in their own right or that iGeners are especially [insert negative opinion here], will reflect carefully on the basis for their position, if not reconsider. Readers of I Wildhood i may be tempted to imagine the focal animals in isolation and that is because some of them literally are - like Slavc the journeying wolf, and my neighborhood fox - but human adolescents are not isolated or off the hook from social and familial obligations. This sort of understanding, enriched by observing a similar phenomenon among monkeys, adds to the revelation in I Wildhood i that, for many animals, self-reliance cannot be achieved without the investment of family and friends. In her memoir I Part Wild i , Ceiridwen Terrill ([8]) ponders the differences between wild wolf and domestic dog development, and it is relevant to I Wildhood i . [Extracted from the article]

Reviews the book "Analysis of Delinquency and Aggression," edited by Emilio Ribes-Inesta and Albert Bandura.

Reviews the book "Foraging Behavior," edited by A.C. Kamil, J.R. Krebs, and H.R. Pulliam.