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Parents have evolved a variety of strategies to minimize risks to their offspring, including complex choices regarding suitable rearing sites, based on abiotic and biotic factors, which differentially affect offspring survival. Because availability and quality of these sites are variable, parents may have to choose between immediately available lower‐quality rearing sites or extended search time....
The cover image is based on the Behavioural Notes Dodging sexual conflict?—Sub‐adult females of a web‐building spider stay cryptic to mate‐seeking adult males, by Andreas Fischer et al. DOI: 10.1111/eth.12807.
Adult males of web‐building spiders often cohabit the webs of sessile sub‐adult (i.e. penultimate instar) females and mate with them as they moult to adults. Often, males accrue benefits from this cohabitation (kleptoparasitism, avoidance of cannibalism, potential polygamy), whereas sub‐adult females may either accrue benefits or incur costs such as curtailed opportunity for mate choice or mate cannibalism...
The physical structure of a signal is not sufficient to determine its meaning. For chemical signals between conspecifics, this concept is termed “pheromonal parsimony.” The function of a compound depends not only on its molecular structure but also on its context, which can include signal concentration and various receiver attributes. We sought to investigate the contextual flexibility of chemosensory...
Many prey flee to refuges to escape from approaching predators, but little is known about how they select one among many refuges available. The problem of choice among alternative refuges has not been modeled previously, but a recent model that predicts flight initiation distance (FID = predator–prey distance when escape starts) for a prey fleeing to a refuge provides a basis for predicting which...
Sexual selection should favour females that can assess the functional fertility of available sexual partners and avoid mating with recently mated, sperm‐depleted males. Our current understanding of the sensory mechanism(s) underlying female assessment of males based on their functional fertility and avoidance of sperm‐depleted males is incomplete. Female Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) are...
Humans, elephants, chimpanzees, and cetaceans show concern with the death of other members of their species and respond to death in particular ways. Science considers that these species are exceptions and that other mammal species show little or no reaction to the dead bodies of individuals of their species. Collared peccaries (Pecari tajacu; Tayassuidae) are social animals that live in groups of...
Geographic variation in courtship behavior can affect reproductive success of divergent phenotypes via mate choice. Over time, this can lead to reproductive isolation and ultimately to speciation. The Neotropical red‐eyed treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) exhibits high levels of phenotypic variation among populations in Costa Rica and Panama, including differences in color pattern, body size, and skin...
Ectotherms frequently thermoregulate behaviorally to improve physiological processes such as digestion and growth, but basking and other thermoregulatory activities can also increase predation risk. Organismal and environmental characteristics can, in some species, influence predation risk associated with thermoregulation and thereby relax or tighten constraints on thermoregulatory behavior, physiological...
Anurans emit distress calls when attacked by predators as a defensive mechanism. As distress calls may trigger antipredator behaviour even in individuals that are not under attack, we tested whether this defensive behaviour induced behavioural changes in neighbouring conspecifics. We compared the behavioural responses of two species of Neotropical hylid frogs (genus Boana) to conspecific distress...
In a single population of a livebearing fish, the green swordtail (Xiphophorus hellerii), a trait considered a static badge of status in males of other populations, the color of a stripe covering the lateral line, has been found to be dynamic relative to their social environment, potentially rendering this signal meaningless. Males change the color expression of their lateral stripe dynamically based...
Studies of sexual selection in animal systems frequently use courtship and receptivity behaviors as metrics for mating success, and this is generally built upon data associating such behaviors with mating. Spider systems are becoming increasingly popular in sexual selection research, and the wolf spider Gladicosa gulosa has the potential to help answer unique questions in animal communication. However,...
Animals adopt different strategies to communicate by means of sound in noisy environments such that some species increase, while others decrease their vocal activity in the presence of interference. Anuran amphibians from diverse latitudes exhibit both kinds of responses. Recent studies have shown that males of Batrachyla taeniata and Batrachyla antartandica from the temperate austral forest do not...
In species with indeterminate growth, differential growth rates can lead to animals adopting alternative reproductive tactics such as sneak–guard phenotypes, which is partially predicted by variation in growth during the juvenile life‐history stage. To investigate sources of growth variation, we examined the independent and joint effects of paternal reproductive tactic (G) and rearing environment...
Predators are a major influence on the breeding site selection decisions of anurans. Many species actively avoid breeding in habitat with predators when given the choice between predator and predator‐free sites. However, certain factors such as site fidelity or conflicting cues may preclude avoidance behavior. We conducted two experiments examining how western chorus frogs, Pseudacris triseriata,...
Dispersal is a critical process that has profound influence on ecological and evolutionary processes. Many proximate factors influence natal dispersal, but it is currently unclear whether the conditions experienced during incubation play an important role. We manipulated incubation temperature and used mark–recapture of released hatchlings to test this hypothesis. We tested this hypothesis on the...
Many aquatic species produce chemical alarm cues that serve as a warning to nearby conspecifics. In mixed‐species aggregations, individuals may also benefit by ‘eavesdropping’ on the chemical alarm cues of other species that are in the same prey guild. Rainbow Darters (Etheostoma caeruleum) are benthic fish that co‐occur with native Ozark Minnows (Notropis nubilus), recently introduced Western Mosquitofish...
In the fish family Poeciliidae, male genitalia, the gonopodia, are remarkably diverse across species; however, we still do not have a good understanding of the evolutionary processes promoting this diversity. For one trait, gonopodium length, several studies support a role for sexual conflict in selection for longer gonopodia. However, genital elongation may come at a cost of reduced locomotor abilities...
Assortative mating is a reproductive strategy used by a diversity of animals, in which individuals choose a mate that shares similar characteristics. This mating strategy has the potential to promote the evolution of various sexual signals and has been a proposed mechanism driving and maintaining color variation in the anuran family Dendrobatidae. Most studies have examined this reproductive strategy...
The social environment of an animal is an especially interesting component of its environment because it can be shaped by both genetic and non‐genetic variation among social partners. Indirect genetic effects (IGEs) are those created when genetic variation in social partners contributes to variation in an individual's phenotype; a potentially common form of IGE occurs when the expression of a behavioral...
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