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#behaviour

2 posts2 participants1 post today
Public
michael

26-Mar-2025
How #elephants plan their journeys: New study reveals energy-saving strategies

new paper from #Oxford legend Fritz Vollrath

eurekalert.org/news-releases/1 #science #zoology #behaviour #ecology #navigation

EurekAlert!How elephants plan their journeys: New study reveals energy-saving strategiesA new study has revealed that African Elephants have an extraordinary ability to meet their colossal food requirements as efficiently as possible. Data from over 150 elephants demonstrated that these giants plan their journeys based on energy costs and resource availability. The findings – published today (26 March) in the Journal of Animal Ecology– could provide crucial information to help protect these iconic animals and their habitats.
Public
flypapers

📰 "Goal learning, memory, and drift in the Drosophila head direction system"
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20
#Drosophila #Behaviour

bioRxiv · Goal learning, memory, and drift in the Drosophila head direction systemSelecting and memorizing goal direction are essential for navigation behavior. Heading information is represented in the head direction systems across species, including Drosophila. However, how navigation decisions are made and how goal memories are represented in these systems is little understood. Here, using a navigation learning assay for flies walking in virtual reality during two-photon imaging, we describe neural dynamics for direction selection and memory. We find that neurons which encode walking direction in the fan-shaped body, a navigation and learning related area in the center of the fly brain, show continuing autonomous activity or directional drift when the animal is at rest. Drift during rest centers around opposite directions to activity during walking, suggesting different computations between these two behavioral states. Targeted optogenetic activation of these neurons during rest is sufficient to induce a subsequent directional navigation preference. Learning leads to changes in drift distributions during rest depending on goal direction, revealing a memory in the network. The fly head direction system thus offers a compact architecture for direction selection, learning, and memory. Changes in neural representations due to goal learning and between rest and walking suggest similarities in navigation circuits across species. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.
Public
Mark

Maxwell Martin said she expected #Labour government “to understand that #fining vulnerable parents is #cruel, #idiotic, & they don’t.

The actor said compassion was leaching out of #schools

There’s no point in banging on about #behaviour & behaviour tsars. You can’t #teach #children to behave better by making them feel shit. It doesn’t work

We need to meet their needs. We need to make them feel they have worth.”

theguardian.com/education/2025

The Guardian · Anna Maxwell Martin calls for end to ‘cruel, idiotic’ fines for school absenceBy Sally Weale
#students#parents#education
Public
Niko Sirmpilatze

🚀 Some exciting news! Our team is taking part in Google Summer of Code, which is a remote, asynchronous, global opportunity.

This is a fantastic chance for someone to get paid to contribute to "movement" or our other open-source projects in neuroscience and animal behaviour.

If you know someone who might be interested, please share widely! 🌍

Full details are here:
neuroinformatics.dev/get-invol

neuroinformatics.devGoogle Summer of Code — NIU
#neuroscience#neuro#behaviour
Public
Soh Kam Yung

Sex genes may not always determine behaviour.

"White-throated Sparrows demonstrate that traits we usually associate with sex can be influenced by genes that are not on sex chromosomes. [...] In all sexually reproducing species, including humans, most genes that contribute to sex-related variation are not known to be linked to any particular genomic architecture."

scientificamerican.com/article

Scientific American · A Backyard Bird Offers a New Way of Thinking about SexesBy Donna L. Maney
#Birds#Behaviour#Sex
Public
Soh Kam Yung

Hah! 🙂

"In a peer reviewed paper published today in Biology Letters, the research team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) in Germany conducted a series of experiments while wearing a range of diving gear, finding that “fish in the wild can discriminate among humans based on external visual cues.”"

cosmosmagazine.com/nature/mari

Cosmos · How to train your fishEuropean researchers have made the startling claim that fish can recognise individual divers.
#Research#Fish#Identification
Replied in thread
Public
RaymondPierreL3

@MatthewToadAgain
Perhaps you may be proven right. But in the meantime there is a pile of #plastics #waste to deal with, not to mention harvesting microplastics from the #environment and our bodies. Also note that water is used, not solvents or pyroclastic processes.

The byproducts of this process do have applications and uses, though much more needs to be done on these to minimise their environmental footprint. It’s a good start no matter which way you look at it. Not a #greenwash since the research attempts to solve a problem.

In closing, note that if we got rid of half the population on this planet (not to say all of it) the environment will be better off although the remaining ecosystems will still produce polluants. There is no way around this, a pristine #ecosystem (void of human kind) would still ‘consume’ and not all byproducts of this consumption will be #recycled by environmental cyclical systems. But I guess if we’re not there to see it it hardly matters at all.

I am all for cleaning up ‘our’ act to save us all from extinction but getting mad isn’t going to solve the issues, hard work, sacrifices and a massive amount of #research, #engineering, commercialisation as well as changes to humankind #behaviour and #attitude is urgently required. IMHO

#ClimateCrisis#extinctionEmergency#SpeciesLoss
Public
michael

4-Feb-2025
Globetrotting not in the genes
New insights into the #paintedLady butterfly’s annual migration

A group of scientists shows that the different #migration strategies are shaped by environmental conditions rather than being encoded in the #butterfly’s DNA.

eurekalert.org/news-releases/1

EurekAlert!Globetrotting not in the genesPainted lady butterflies are world travelers. The ones we encounter in Europe fly from Africa to Sweden, ultimately returning to areas north and south of the Sahara. But what determines whether some butterflies travel long distances while others travel short distances? A group of scientists, including from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), shows that the different migration strategies are shaped by environmental conditions rather than being encoded in the butterfly’s DNA.
#science#insects#ecology
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