Behavioral Ecology

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

List of Papers (Total 2,755)

Learning about aposematic prey

The question, “Why should prey advertise their presence to predators using warning coloration?” has been asked for over 150 years. It is now widely acknowledged that defended prey use conspicuous or distinctive colors to advertise their toxicity to would-be predators: a defensive strategy known as aposematism. One of the main approaches to understanding the ecology and evolution...

Comparing pre- and post-copulatory mate competition using social network analysis in wild crickets

Sexual selection results from variation in success at multiple stages in the mating process, including competition before and after mating. The relationship between these forms of competition, such as whether they trade-off or reinforce one another, influences the role of sexual selection in evolution. However, the relationship between these 2 forms of competition is rarely...

Spoils of war and peace: enemy adoption and queen-right colony fusion follow costly intraspecific conflict in acacia ants

Intraspecific conflicts over vital limited resources can lead to costly fights, which may leave victors at subsequent risk of fitness costs through diminished defensive capability or resource holding capacity. How victors compensate for potential costs and minimize the threat of Pyrrhic victory is not well known. We tracked the outcomes of experimentally induced field conflicts...

Locomotory mimicry in ant-like spiders

The jumping spider genus Myrmarachne (Salticidae) consists of over 200 species of morphologically accurate ant mimics, enabling Myrmarachne to evade ant-averse predators that confuse the spiders with ants (Batesian mimicry). A conspicuous but untested trait of Myrmarachne, which is frequently mentioned in the literature, is locomotory mimicry. For these spiders, locomotion that...

Maternal effects as a mechanism for manipulating male care and resolving sexual conflict over care

Understanding how sexual conflict influences male and female parental decisions is a long-standing problem in behavioral ecology. Until now, most research on sexual conflict over parental care has focused on behavioral mechanisms mediating the resolution of this conflict through negotiation between parents. Here, we review evidence suggesting that maternal effects that alter...

Internest food sharing within wood ant colonies: resource redistribution behavior in a complex system

Resource sharing is an important cooperative behavior in many animals. Sharing resources is particularly important in social insect societies, as division of labor often results in most individuals including, importantly, the reproductives, relying on other members of the colony to provide resources. Sharing resources between individuals is therefore fundamental to the success of...

“Parasite-induced aposematism” protects entomopathogenic nematode parasites against invertebrate enemies

Aposematism is a well-known strategy in which prey defend themselves from predation by pairing defenses such as toxins, with warning signals that are often visually conspicuous color patterns. Here, we examine the possibility that aposematism can be induced in a host by colonies of infectious parasites in order to protect the parasites from the consequences of attacks on the host...

An experimental conflict of interest between parasites reveals the mechanism of host manipulation

Parasites can increase their host’s predation susceptibility. It is a long-standing puzzle, whether this is caused by host manipulation, an evolved strategy of the parasite, or by side effects due to, for example, the parasite consuming energy from its host thereby changing the host’s trade-off between avoiding predation and foraging toward foraging. Here, we use sequential...

Flexible color learning in an invertebrate predator: Habronattus jumping spiders can learn to prefer or avoid red during foraging

Understanding the design of prey defenses, such as aposematic colors, involves considering perceptual and cognitive abilities of predators that drive their evolution. Research has focused on avian predators, with little attention to small invertebrate predators. Jumping spiders are abundant and voracious; here, we examined their ability to learn, remember, and generalize color...

A lover or a fighter? Opposing sexual selection pressures on men’s vocal pitch and facial hair

The traditional assumption within the research literature on human sexually dimorphic traits has been that many sex differences have arisen from intersexual selection. More recently, however, there has been a shift toward the idea that many male features, including male lower-pitched voices and male beard growth, might have arisen predominantly through intrasexual selection: that...

Temperature can shape a cline in polyandry, but only genetic variation can sustain it over time

Multiple mating by females (polyandry) is a widespread behavior occurring in diverse taxa, species, and populations. Polyandry can also vary widely within species, and individual populations, so that both monandrous and polyandrous females occur together. Genetic differences can explain some of this intraspecific variation in polyandry, but environmental factors are also likely...

Effect of competitive cues on reproductive morphology and behavioral plasticity in male fruitflies

Phenotypic plasticity will be favored whenever there are significant fitness benefits of responding to environmental variation. The extent and nature of the plasticity that evolves depends on the rate of environmental fluctuations and the capacity to track and respond to that variability. Reproductive environments represent one arena in which changes can be rapid. The finding...

Timing of extrapair fertilizations: within-pair fertilization trade-offs or pair synchrony spillovers?

In socially monogamous species, male fertilization-related behaviors are expected to be tuned to the fertile cycle of their social female. How a male adjusts his fertilization-related behaviors to his social mate’s fertile period is relatively well understood. However, the influence of the social mate’s fertility stage on a male’s extrapair siring success remains poorly studied...