Animal behaviour articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some atmospheric pollutants may disrupt chemical communication in insects. Here, the authors show that exposure to elevated ozone disrupts pheromone-mediated mate recognition and increases hybridization in laboratory colonies of four Drosophila species.

    • Nan-Ji Jiang
    • , Xinqi Dong
    •  & Markus Knaden

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear why flying insects congregate around artificial light sources. Here, the authors use high-speed videography and motion-capture, finding that insects fly perpendicular to light sources due to a disruption of the dorsal light response.

    • Samuel T. Fabian
    • , Yash Sondhi
    •  & Huai-Ti Lin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Varroa and Tropilaelaps mites threaten honeybee health. This study finds that mites alter feeding habits depends on their own, and hosts’, life history stage. Mites feed on the host hemolymph when parasitizing pupae during their reproductive stage but consume fat body during their dispersal stage.

    • Bin Han
    • , Jiangli Wu
    •  & Shufa Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although intraspecific dominance hierarchies are common, large scale interspecific dominance hierarchies are unknown. Using data from hundreds of avian species, the authors find that species that are more familiar with each other engage in less aggression and the aggression is resolved more directly.

    • Gavin M. Leighton
    • , Jonathan P. Drury
    •  & Eliot T. Miller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parental care in birds includes diverse behaviours but the variation in care from each parent across the breeding cycle and between species is unclear. Here, the authors study 1533 bird species, finding different patterns across breeding stages, and that species with strong sexual selection or paternity uncertainty tend to show female-biased care.

    • Daiping Wang
    • , Wenyuan Zhang
    •  & Xiang-Yi Li Richter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cost-effective biodiversity monitoring through time is important for evidence-based conservation. Here, the authors show that automated bioacoustics monitoring can be used to track tropical forest recovery from agricultural abandonment, suggesting its use to assess restoration outcomes.

    • Jörg Müller
    • , Oliver Mitesser
    •  & Zuzana Buřivalová

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Corral-Lopez et al. use guppies as a model system for the evolution of collective motion. They show that guppies artificially selected for schooling remain highly coordinated across predation contexts and show key changes in brain morphology that likely increase the efficiency of sensory information relay.

    • Alberto Corral-Lopez
    • , Alexander Kotrschal
    •  & Niclas Kolm

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neural coding of goal direction remains unclear in insects. Here, the authors describe goal-direction neurons in the monarch butterfly brain that specifically encode the insect’s desired flight direction during spatial orientation.

    • M. Jerome Beetz
    • , Christian Kraus
    •  & Basil el Jundi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Individuals may benefit from adjusting their social relationships strategically in response to changing conditions, but evidence in wild animals is limited. Using an automated field experiment, the authors show that wild jackdaws learn to modify their social interactions to maximise foraging rewards, while retaining valuable long-term relationships.

    • Michael Kings
    • , Josh J. Arbon
    •  & Alex Thornton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Workers in social insects such as honey bees, bumble bees, and ants are expected to spend their lives helping their mother reproduce. Here the authors show that workers of several bumble bee species can in fact mate and lead colonies of their own.

    • Mingsheng Zhuang
    • , Thomas J. Colgan
    •  & Jilian Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Behaviour drives infection risk in social groups. Here, Li et al. show that depending on the behavioural role of clonal ants in a colony, genetically identical individuals face vastly different risks of becoming infected with parasitic nematodes.

    • Zimai Li
    • , Bhoomika Bhat
    •  & Yuko Ulrich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Changes in the abundance and diversity of neural cell types provide the substrate for behavioral evolution. This study provides evidence of extensive, mosaic expansion of an integration brain center, among closely related Heliconiini butterflies, associated with increased neuron number, visual processing and long term memory.

    • Antoine Couto
    • , Fletcher J. Young
    •  & Stephen H. Montgomery

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Birdsong is simultaneously repetitive and highly diverse. Sierro et al. resolve this apparent paradox through experiments in blue tits showing that consistent repetition is a fitness indicator, while song diversity reduces habituation during singing displays.

    • Javier Sierro
    • , Selvino R. de Kort
    •  & Ian R. Hartley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Challenges rearing juvenile cone snails have limited our understanding of their developmental biology. This study cultured Conus magus cone snails and revealed how complex morphological, behavioural and molecular changes facilitate the ontogenetic shift from juvenile worm-hunters to fish-hunting adults.

    • Aymeric Rogalski
    • , S. W. A. Himaya
    •  & Richard J. Lewis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Syntax is a key feature distinguishing human language from other animal communication systems. Here, Leroux et al. show that chimpanzees produce a compositional syntactic-like structure, suggesting syntax might be evolutionary ancient and potentially already present in our last common ancestor with chimpanzees.

    • Maël Leroux
    • , Anne M. Schel
    •  & Simon W. Townsend

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The degree to which species tolerate human disturbance contributes to shape human-wildlife coexistence. Here, the authors identify key predictors of avian tolerance of humans across 842 bird species from open tropical ecosystems.

    • Peter Mikula
    • , Oldřich Tomášek
    •  & Tomáš Albrecht

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The opportunity for sexual selection is a key evolutionary parameter but we know little about its temporal dynamics. Using data from multiple animal species the authors show that this metric varies rapidly through time and that simulations should be used to avoid substantial misinterpretation.

    • Rômulo Carleial
    • , Tommaso Pizzari
    •  & Grant C. McDonald

  • Article
    | Open Access

    You’re unique just like everyone else. But when does such individuality appear? Laskowski et al. find that clonal fish show unique behavioral patterns on their first day of life, and these patterns predict their behavior up to at least 10 weeks later.

    • Kate L. Laskowski
    • , David Bierbach
    •  & Max Wolf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Invasive species are a leading driver of global biodiversity loss. Here, the authors show that the process of invasion itself can promote behavioral changes important to the success of widespread invaders, with implications for understanding the effects of alien species on invaded communities.

    • David G. Chapple
    • , Annalise C. Naimo
    •  & Bob B. M. Wong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using a season-long field manipulation with an established model fish system on the Great Barrier Reef, this study demonstrates that limiting motorboat activity on reefs leads to faster growth and survival of more fish offspring compared to reefs experiencing busy motorboat traffic. Noise mitigation and abatement could therefore present a valuable opportunity for enhancing ecosystem resilience.

    • Sophie L. Nedelec
    • , Andrew N. Radford
    •  & Stephen D. Simpson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Intra-specific variations may contribute to heterogeneous responses to climate change across a species’ range. Here, the authors investigate the phenology of two bird species across their breeding ranges, and find that their sensitivity to temperature is uncoupled from exposure to climate change.

    • Liam D. Bailey
    • , Martijn van de Pol
    •  & Marcel E. Visser

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Vision in mosquitoes plays a critical but understudied role in their attraction to hosts. Here, the authors show that encounter with an attractive odor gates the mosquito attraction to specific colors, especially the long wavelengths reflected from human skin. Filtering the long wavelengths reflected from the human skin or knocking-out the ability for the mosquito to detect the wavelengths, suppressed their attraction. This work transforms our understanding of mosquito vision from the conventional view that vision does little in mediating mosquito-host interactions, to the recognition that vision plays a critical role.

    • Diego Alonso San Alberto
    • , Claire Rusch
    •  & Jeffrey A. Riffell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Learning from one’s own experience, and/or social learning from older individuals, could influence decision-making in migrating birds. Here the authors analyse 16 years of tracking data on whooping cranes to show that whether social or experiential learning is the dominant process in migration timing depends on life stage.

    • Briana Abrahms
    • , Claire S. Teitelbaum
    •  & Sarah J. Converse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The parasite causing toxoplasmosis can manipulate prey to behave in ways that promote transmission to the parasite’s definitive feline hosts. The first study consistent with this extended phenotype in the wild finds that infected hyena cubs approach lions more closely than uninfected peers and have higher rates of lion mortality.

    • Eben Gering
    • , Zachary M. Laubach
    •  & Thomas Getty

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An experimental study finds that birds and bats avoid whitewater river noise, and that intense noise reduces bird foraging activity and causes bats to switch hunting strategies. Overlap between noise and song frequency predicts bird declines until high levels where other mechanisms appear important.

    • D. G. E. Gomes
    • , C. A. Toth
    •  & J. R. Barber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Studying how songbirds learn songs can shed light on the development of human speech. An analysis of 160 tutor-pupil zebra finch pairs suggests that frequency dependent balanced imitation prevents the extinction of rare song elements and the overabundance of common ones, promoting song diversity within groups and species recognition across groups.

    • Ofer Tchernichovski
    • , Sophie Eisenberg-Edidin
    •  & Erich D. Jarvis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social animals have sophisticated ways of classifying relationships with conspecifics. Data from 30 years of observations and playback experiments on dolphins with a multi-level alliance system show that individuals form social concepts that categorize conspecifics according to their shared cooperative history.

    • Stephanie L. King
    • , Richard C. Connor
    •  & Simon J. Allen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cooperative species, like humans, can display spontaneously prosocial behaviour. Experiments on a monogamous fish with biparental care shows that pair bonded males are prosocial to both their long-term mates and to strange females, but make antisocial choices if their mate is watching, or if another male is the potential recipient.

    • Shun Satoh
    • , Redouan Bshary
    •  & Masanori Kohda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Honey bee workers take on different tasks for the colony as they age. Here, the authors develop a method to extract a descriptor of the individuals’ social networks and show that interaction patterns predict task allocation and distinguish different developmental trajectories.

    • Benjamin Wild
    • , David M. Dormagen
    •  & Tim Landgraf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    While size exaggeration is common in the animal kingdom, Pisanski & Reby show that human listeners can detect deceptive vocal signals of people trying to sound bigger or smaller, and recalibrate their estimates accordingly, especially men judging the heights of other men, with implications for the evolution of vocal communication.

    • Katarzyna Pisanski
    •  & David Reby

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Connecting genotypes to complex social behaviour is challenging. Taylor et al. use machine learning to show a strong response of caste-associated gene expression to queen loss, wherein individual wasp’s expression profiles become intermediate between queen and worker states, even in the absence of behavioural changes.

    • Benjamin A. Taylor
    • , Alessandro Cini
    •  & Seirian Sumner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strong social bonds are known to affect pairwise cooperation in primates such chimpanzees. Here, Samuni et al. show that strong social bonds also influence participation in group-level cooperation (collective action in intergroup encounters) using a long-term dataset of wild chimpanzees.

    • Liran Samuni
    • , Catherine Crockford
    •  & Roman M. Wittig

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    The social intelligence hypothesis predicts that social organisms tend to be more intelligent because within-group interactions drive cognitive evolution. Here, authors propose that conspecific outsiders can be just as important in selecting for sophisticated cognitive adaptations.

    • Benjamin J. Ashton
    • , Patrick Kennedy
    •  & Andrew N. Radford

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Song et al. inferred that stridulatory wings and tibial ears co-evolved in a sexual context among crickets, katydids, and their allies, while abdominal ears evolved first in a non-sexual context in grasshoppers, and were later co-opted for courtship. They found little evidence that the evolution of these organs increased lineage diversification.

    • Hojun Song
    • , Olivier Béthoux
    •  & Sabrina Simon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Animal signals often encode information on the emitter’s species identity. Using woodpecker drumming as a model, here the authors show that limited signal divergence during a clade radiation does not impair species discrimination, as long as the signals are adapted to local ecological requirements.

    • Maxime Garcia
    • , Frédéric Theunissen
    •  & Nicolas Mathevon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Environmental variability is one potential driver of behavioural and cultural diversity in humans and other animals. Here, the authors show that chimpanzee behavioural diversity is higher in habitats that are more seasonal and historically unstable, and in savannah woodland relative to forested sites.

    • Ammie K. Kalan
    • , Lars Kulik
    •  & Hjalmar S. Kühl

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