138 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.
Contrary to the typical expectation of higher male mortality in polygynous species, a study on the protogynous cleaner wrasse *Labroides dimidiatus* during the 2024 El Niño event revealed that terminal-phase males exhibited greater survival than initial-phase females, whose mortality more than doubled due to physiological vulnerabilities linked to faster growth rates.
This paper demonstrates that the sea hare's buccal mass achieves large odontophore protractions during distinct feeding behaviors through context-dependent mechanical reconfigurations, revealing a fundamental distinction between "constrained" and "unconstrained" muscular hydrostats that rely on different control strategies based on the presence of mechanical constraints.
This study investigates the flight kinematics of black soldier flies subjected to discrete headwind gusts, revealing rapid, asymmetric wing and body responses that combine passive and active control mechanisms to maintain stability, thereby offering critical insights for designing robust micro aerial vehicles.
This paper introduces a multi-domain framework that extracts stable, low-dimensional latent representations from professional Counter-Strike 2 telemetry to identify interpretable behavioral phenotypes and predict individual performance transfer across diverse contexts.
This study provides the first insights into restlessness as a potential welfare indicator in fattening bulls, revealing that animals in fully-slatted and straw-based systems exhibit significantly higher behavioral transitions than those on organic pasture, likely due to environmental monotony or feeding-related discomfort.
This paper demonstrates that confidence in perceptual decisions does not rely on a single computational mechanism, but rather adapts to task demands, with an intentional architecture better explaining incentivized motion discrimination and a hierarchical probabilistic model better capturing un-incentivized luminance discrimination.
This paper reports the first documented instance of spontaneous, tool-assisted drumming in a captive Galah, which produced rhythmically organized tapping with a hierarchical structure without training, thereby expanding the known scope of rhythmic and tool-using abilities in parrots.
This study characterizes a novel *Sts*-deficient mouse model that lacks steroid sulfatase activity and exhibits increased activity, higher normalized heart weights, and sex-specific behavioral differences, providing a valuable tool for investigating the physiological and behavioral consequences of STS deficiency.
This study validates and optimizes a modular, open-source pre-processing pipeline (GENEAcore) for wearable accelerometer data, demonstrating its ability to ensure high-quality, transparent, and traceable digital measures through rigorous calibration, non-wear detection, and behavioral transition analysis that significantly impacts activity duration calculations.
This study demonstrates that reef fish selectively trigger escape responses based on the approach speed of visual stimuli, matching their reactions to actual predator attack speeds while ignoring harmless cruising speeds, with species-specific strategies further shaping these behaviors.