81 papers
Animal behavior and cognition explores the fascinating inner lives of creatures big and small, from how a crow solves a puzzle to why dogs seem to understand human emotions. This field investigates the mental processes and social interactions that drive the natural world, revealing that intelligence and awareness take many forms across species.
At Gist.Science, we bring these discoveries directly from bioRxiv to your screen. Our team processes every new preprint in this category from bioRxiv, ensuring you have access to the latest research through both detailed technical summaries and easy-to-understand plain-language explanations. Whether you are a researcher or a curious reader, you can dive deep into the data or grasp the core concepts without the barrier of dense academic jargon.
Below are the most recent papers exploring the minds and behaviors of animals, freshly processed and ready for you to explore.
The paper introduces eeeHive, a custom high-frequency (HF) RFID-based automated tracking system that overcomes the low data rates and simultaneous identification limitations of conventional low-frequency systems to enable high-resolution, long-term behavioral monitoring of group-housed animals across both terrestrial and aquatic species.
By analyzing 3D trajectories of *Anopheles gambiae* swarms, this study provides experimental evidence of collective behavior through the discovery of spatially correlated speed fluctuations among males, suggesting that mosquito swarms are driven by active male-male interactions rather than independent responses to a visual marker.
By combining high-resolution behavioural phenotyping with experimental partitioning of injury, immune stimulation, and live infection in *Drosophila*, this study demonstrates that fine-scale analysis of movement microstructure can distinguish adaptive sickness behaviour from pathogen-induced pathology, revealing that early changes in activity bout dynamics predict survival outcomes.
This paper proposes and validates a "calculus of attention" (CES) based on Control, Energy, and Surprise to demonstrate that high stability in these audiovisual features serves as an evolutionarily conserved signal of fitness and performance quality across human music, animal vocalizations, and live interactions.
This study demonstrates that artificial light intensity, structure, and background contrast significantly alter moth flight behavior by increasing attraction and path tortuosity, particularly with white LEDs and point sources, while higher background lighting suppresses flight activity, suggesting that mitigation policies should prioritize reducing light intensity.
This study demonstrates that in naturalistic foraging tasks, both the temporal distribution of reward availability and the reliability of sensory cues significantly shape how macaque monkeys allocate their time and effort across different patches.
This study characterizes the morphometric variations among SiifDacar, Hoor, and Eyddimo dromedary camel types in Mogadishu, Somalia, revealing significant differences in body dimensions by breed and sex, with SiifDacar females being the largest and males generally exceeding females in size, thereby supporting the classification of these local types as distinct breeds.
This study reveals that adolescent social isolation in female mice induces latent deficits in maternal care and intergenerational social dysfunction via hypofunction of the mCg-to-PrL neural circuit, which can be rescued by co-housing with experienced mothers.
By reconstructing *C. elegans* foraging in 3D, this study reveals that the worm achieves optimal search efficiency through a hierarchical locomotion strategy driven by cost constraints and a limited shape-space, supporting a unifying framework where optimal decision-making emerges from maximizing information gain under embodied constraints.
Despite lacking a fovea and high spatial acuity, tree shrews demonstrate robust transformation-tolerant object recognition comparable to primates, suggesting that high-level visual generalization relies on intermediate and deep cortical processing rather than front-end optical resolution.