Behavioural ecology articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bumblebees can learn how to open a two-step puzzle box by observing another trained bee, indicating that these insects can use social learning to acquire a behaviour too complex to otherwise be learnt through individual trial and error.

    • Alice D. Bridges
    • , Amanda Royka
    •  & Lars Chittka

  • Article |

    A study that tracked mammal populations before, during and after a severe storm in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park finds that behavioural responses and survival are linked to body size, with increased mortality of small species owing to limited mobility and changes in food availability.

    • Reena H. Walker
    • , Matthew C. Hutchinson
    •  & Ryan A. Long

  • Article |

    4-Vinylanisole, which is emitted by gregarious locusts or as a result of aggregation of solitary locusts, is identified as an aggregation pheromone that strongly attracts both solitary and gregarious locusts, acting via the olfactory receptor OR35.

    • Xiaojiao Guo
    • , Qiaoqiao Yu
    •  & Le Kang

  • Article |

    A rock art panel from Sulawesi—dated to at least 43.9 thousand years ago—represents the oldest currently known figurative art in the world, and provides evidence of early storytelling through narrative hunting scenes.

    • Maxime Aubert
    • , Rustan Lebe
    •  & Adam Brumm

  • Letter |

    Tadpoles of strawberry poison frogs (Oophaga pumilio) are shown to imprint on adult coloration, affecting both male aggression biases and female preferences and setting the stage for speciation by sexual selection.

    • Yusan Yang
    • , Maria R. Servedio
    •  & Corinne L. Richards-Zawacki

  • Letter |

    Female zebra finches exhibited categorical perception of colour signals, as they categorized colour stimuli that varied along a continuous scale and showed increased discrimination between colours from opposite sides of the category boundary compared to equally different colours from within a category.

    • Eleanor M. Caves
    • , Patrick A. Green
    •  & Stephen Nowicki

  • Letter |

    A derivation of Hamilton’s rule that considers explicit environmental stochasticity can predict when organisms should pay a cost to influence the variance in the reproductive success of their relatives, formalizing the link between bet-hedging and altruism.

    • Patrick Kennedy
    • , Andrew D. Higginson
    •  & Seirian Sumner

  • Letter |

    Socially synchronized rhythms in shorebirds were assessed during biparental incubation under natural circumstances and were exceptionally diverse, often not following the 24-h day, whereby risk of predation, not starvation, determined some of the variation in incubation rhythms.

    • Martin Bulla
    • , Mihai Valcu
    •  & Bart Kempenaers

  • Letter |

    A species-wide study shows that the Hawaiian crow Corvus hawaiiensis is a highly proficient tool user, creating opportunities for comparative studies with tool-using New Caledonian crows and other corvids.

    • Christian Rutz
    • , Barbara C. Klump
    •  & Bryce M. Masuda

  • Letter |

    In wild Kalahari meerkats (Suricata suricatta), subordinates of both sexes respond to experimentally induced increases in the growth of same-sex rivals by raising their own growth rate and food intake.

    • Elise Huchard
    • , Sinead English
    •  & Tim Clutton-Brock

  • Letter |

    Despite substantial evidence that neonicotinoid pesticides can have negative effects on bees, there have been no reports that this leads to problems with pollination; here bumblebee colonies exposed to a neonicotinoid are shown to provide reduced pollination services to apple trees, leading to a reduction in seed number.

    • Dara A. Stanley
    • , Michael P. D. Garratt
    •  & Nigel E. Raine

  • Letter |

    By quantifying the colouration of all approximately 6,000 species of passerine birds, certain life-history traits such as large body size and tropical distribution are found to increase ornamentation in both male and female birds, whereas cooperative breeding increases it in females only, and sexual selection diminishes it in females more than it increases it in males.

    • James Dale
    • , Cody J. Dey
    •  & Mihai Valcu

  • Letter |

    Here, colonies of social spiders are used to investigate the evolution of a group-level trait, the ratio of individuals with the ‘docile’ versus ‘aggressive’ phenotype in a colony; experimental colonies were generated with varying ratios and established in the wild, revealing group-level selection.

    • Jonathan N. Pruitt
    •  & Charles J. Goodnight

  • Letter |

    The fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis has been implicated in the decline of a large number of amphibian species; here it is shown that frogs can learn to avoid the pathogen, acquire resistance to it and be immunized against it using dead pathogen, findings that potentially offer a way in which resistant populations could be reintroduced into areas that have seen catastrophic declines.

    • Taegan A. McMahon
    • , Brittany F. Sears
    •  & Jason R. Rohr

  • Letter |

    Manipulation of the frequency of naturally occurring colour patterns within replicate pools of fish at three sites shows that males with rare colour patterns have higher reproductive fitness, demonstrating negative frequency-dependent selection mediated by sexual selection.

    • Kimberly A. Hughes
    • , Anne E. Houde
    •  & F. Helen Rodd

  • News & Views |

    Behavioural traits can influence an individual animal's fitness, and trait combinations can change over its lifetime, according to a study of wild trout during a key period in their development.

    • Alison M. Bell

  • News |

    Offspring of predator-stressed mothers grow their wings more quickly than chicks from predator-free females.

    • Matt Kaplan

  • Letter |

    Much of what we know about the behaviour of animals in the wild comes from studies in which individual animals are marked for identification purposes. But can the marking itself affect the outcome? This study shows that it does. In a ten-year study on king penguins in the Antarctic, penguins sporting identification bands on their wings had significantly lower long-term fitness than unmarked penguins. This study should give pause for thought to researchers seeking to discover the behaviour of animals in the wild.

    • Claire Saraux
    • , Céline Le Bohec
    •  & Yvon Le Maho

  • News & Views |

    To reduce parental care, just add water — that's the conclusion of an intriguing investigation into the extent of the motherly and fatherly devotion that different species of frog extend to their offspring.

    • Hanna Kokko
    •  & Michael Jennions

  • News & Views |

    Parent birds commonly face the problem of distinguishing their own brood from foreign chicks. Learnt chick-recognition evolves only when parents do not mistakenly learn to reject their own young.

    • Rebecca Kilner

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