Behavioral Ecology ePosters

To survive, organisms must make rapid inferences about their surroundings. For example, to successfully escape approaching predators, prey must estimate the direction of approach from noisy stimuli [1]. Such rapid inferences are particularly challenging because there is little time to gather sensory information, yet…

Social interactions in nonhuman primates involve complex communication, outcome evaluation, and behavioral adjustments. Social gaze is a vital mechanism for gathering information during such interactions. We investigated the role of social gaze in cooperative behavior among common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) using…

Nascent animals are most in need of learning to identify predators due to their vulnerability, yet paradoxically, are generally assumed not to be capable of such rapid, complex learning tasks. Here, a robotic fish-attacker interaction assay showed that larval zebrafish just a week of age learn to identify and avoid a…

In natural environments, animals must efficiently allocate their choices across multiple concurrently available resources when foraging, a complex decision-making process not fully captured by existing models. To understand how animals learn to navigate this challenge we developed a novel paradigm in which untrained,…

Foraging, the set of behaviors associated with seeking valuable resources (e.g., food, water) while avoiding danger (e.g., predators), is ubiquitous among organisms, but its neural circuit basis is presently unclear. Most existing work on navigation, a key component of foraging, involves animals in small, fully…

Social foraging is a fundamental collective behavior observed across various species, but studying complex multi-agent dynamics and accompanying neural activity in natural settings remains challenging. Here we present an in silico study of social interaction during foraging using recurrent neural network (RNN) agents…

Predatory behavior is crucial for survival and fitness in many species, evolving through complex interactions of genetics, adaptation, and learning. This interplay of innate and acquired neural mechanisms makes predation a rich subject for neuroscientific and neuroethological investigation. Current approaches to…

Many species cohesively navigate their environment as a group. This includes fish schools and shoals, where group structure emerges from social interactions, which can subsequently facilitate adaptive advantages such as collective foraging. While previous work has characterized how group structure emerges from social…

Although animals including humans are near-optimal foragers (Charnov 1974), interindividual differences in foraging strategies exist and have been associated with differences in internal states like stress and anxiety (Yonce et al.2021, Lenow et al., 2017). However, the underlying neural mechanisms relating anxiety…

Nightingales are renowned for their large song repertoire, including the acoustically distinct type of so-called whistle songs. These contain temporal sequences of unmodulated tonal syllables, known as whistle syllables, defining the fundamental frequency of the song, i.e., the pitch. While recent research has shown…

The ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field and use it for orientation and navigation is widespread in the animal kingdom. The neuronal mechanisms of this sensory ability are, however, still poorly understood. African mole-rats are subterranean mammals that are suggested to use magnetic cues for orientation in…

All living beings face the universal challenge of foraging (i.e. finding and consuming energy sources while balancing overall energy expenditure). Impressively, in precocial animals such as larval zebrafish, evolutionarily embedded innate neural programs are able to overcome this challenge with no parental guidance…

It remains controversial whether the ability to represent the world from the perspective of another (mentalising), is confined to humans. To address this question, we combined computational models of mentalising with a new experimental setup of Guinea baboons living in a social colony, which required no direct human…

The mechanisms underlying the emergence of a social organization in mice are mainly studied in unisex male colonies. In isogenic male mice groups, we previously showed that sociability trait predicts rank attainment in social hierarchy whereas differences in anxiety between highest and lowest ranked individuals…

An emerging body of scientific evidence strongly supports the notion of mice exhibiting prosocial actions, such as helping and rescuing behavior. However, prior studies have primarily focused on single or pair-housed animals, leaving a gap in our understanding of how social interactions contribute to the underlying…

As animals execute essential behaviors like foraging, they must orient with respect to the space around them. That is, they must have some neural/behavioral mechanism for spatial navigation. One such navigation mechanism is path integration, whereby animals recall their starting point by continuously measuring…

Foraging is a complex behavior vital for survival regularly involving memory anddecision-making to optimize costs and benefits. How long should an animal stay near a foodsource, and when should it move to a better food patch? In this poster, we investigate pigeons’foraging behavior testing predictions from the…

Human societies are structured in a hierarchical manner, be that the work place, government, the playground, or even home-life. Hierarchies are thought to give a system stability; each node within a social network knowing who is above and who is below. However, there is very little experimental research exploring the…

Alloparental behaviors consist in a set of actions undertaken by adults to insure pups’ survival. Naive virgin mice can display alloparental behaviors the first time they are exposed to pups but their performances improve after a long or several exposures. The neurobiological substrates of this phenomenon are still…

Work has shown that the ventrolateral division of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) encodes a generalized state of social threat and is necessary and sufficient for producing both social aggression and avoidance. However, it remains unclear how the selection between aggression and avoidance occurs and how this…

Natural behavior requires flexible adjustments, for example when navigating complex environments or escaping predators. Previously, whole-brain recordings in C. elegans uncovered that a large proportion of neuronal activity relates to motor commands. However, the role of these distributed motor commands remains…

Making decisions and effort to obtain rewards may depend on various factors, such as the delay to reward, the probability of its occurrence, and the information that can be collected about it. We implemented a task in which pigeons were allowed to choose between three options and to peck at the chosen key to improve…

Cuttlefish skin is a powerful rendering device capable of producing extraordinary changes in visual appearance over a broad range of temporal scales. Exhibiting a repertoire of chromatic, postural, and locomotion patterns, cuttlefish employ their versatile abilities for both camouflage and communication purposes. Our…

When foraging in dynamic and uncertain environments, animals can benefit from basing their decisions on smart inferences about hidden properties of the world. Typical theoretical approaches for understanding the strategies that animals use in such settings combine Bayesian inference and value iteration to derive…