Showing posts with label dwarf mongooses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dwarf mongooses. Show all posts

Thursday, 31 May 2018

Mongooses remember and reward helpful friends



May 28, 2018, University of Bristol

Dwarf mongooses remember previous cooperative acts by their group mates and reward them later, according to new work by University of Bristol researchers, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Market trade was once considered the domain of humans but the exchange of goods and services is now widely recognised in other animals. What the new research shows is that mongooses have sufficient cognitive ability to quantify earlier acts of cooperation and to provide suitable levels of delayed rewards.

Senior author, Professor Andy Radford from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences, said: "Humans frequently trade goods and can track the amount they owe using memories of past exchanges. While nonhuman animals are also known to be capable of trading cooperative acts immediately for one another, more contentious is the possibility that there can be delayed rewards."

Lead author, Dr. Julie Kern, also from Bristol, added: "There have been hardly any suitable experimental tests on wild animals, especially non-primates. By working with groups of dwarf mongooses habituated to our close presence, we could collect detailed observations and conduct experimental manipulations in natural conditions."

The study is the first to provide experimental evidence in a wild non-primate population for delayed contingent cooperation—providing a later reward to an individual for the amount of cooperation it has performed. It also offers convincing evidence of cross-commodity trading, whereby individuals reward one type of cooperative behaviour with a different cooperative act. In this case, grooming was traded for sentinel behaviour, which involves an individual adopting a raised position to look out for danger and warning foraging groupmates with alarm calls.


Sunday, 10 December 2017

In mongoose society, immigrants are a bonus—when given time to settle in


December 4, 2017
Researchers studying wild dwarf mongooses have provided insight into what happens when immigrants join a new group. The study in Current Biology on December 4 shows that, initially, recent immigrants rarely serve as lookout, which means they provide little information to help the rest of the group. Even when they do act cooperatively, their new groupmates tend to ignore what they have to offer. But, within five months, the new arrivals become fully integrated and valued members within mongoose society.

"A few months after arriving in a new group, former immigrants are contributing as often as residents and their information is used just as much, but to reach that stage requires a transition period," says Andrew Radford of the University of Bristol, UK.

That's probably because the dispersal process is tough on individuals, notes the lead author of the study, Julie Kern. "Recent immigrants are typically exhausted and run down, as evidenced by a loss of weight," she says. "Even if they tried, they couldn't contribute fully at first because other members don't yet know them."

The study is one of the first to explore the impact of dispersal events on social-information provision and use within groups. It also shows that the expected benefits associated with an increase in group size may not be as straightforward as scientists have often assumed.

Dwarf mongooses within a group depend on each other. For instance, individuals will stand guard, serving as sentinels that keep a watch for predators and call to warn the rest of the group when one is near. Sentinels also issue calls to announce that they're watching. By providing this social information, sentinels allow other group members to concentrate more on foraging. What the researchers wanted to know is how new group members contributed to these tasks and whether the information they provided was used by others.

Read more at: 

Sunday, 30 October 2016

Human-made noise can affect how animals use information from scents




Date: October 24, 2016
Source: University of Bristol

Research by scientists at the University of Bristol has, for the first time, found that human-made noise can have a detrimental impact on an animal's use of scent -- putting them at greater risk of being attacked by predators.

Using field-based experimental trials on dwarf mongooses in South Africa, the researchers combined sound recordings and fecal samples to demonstrate that road-noise playback negatively affected the mongooses' ability to detect predator feces. Even after detection, the additional noise led to less information gathering and less vigilance, making the mongooses more vulnerable to danger.

Professor Andy Radford from the School of Biological Sciences said: "We've known for a long time that noise from urbanisation, traffic and airports can detrimentally affect humans by causing stress, sleep deprivation, cardiac problems and slower learning. What's becoming increasingly clear is that a lot of other species -- mammals, birds, fish, insects and amphibians -- are also impacted in all sorts of ways by anthropogenic, or human-made, noise."

One obvious way in which human-made noise can cause animals problems is through the masking of valuable acoustic information. Lead author Amy Morris-Drake says: "What our study shows for the first time is that there could also be disruption to the use of olfactory information; human-made noise could affect decision-making based on information gathered using a different sense."

The Bristol team's experiment used groups of wild dwarf mongooses that were so familiar with the researchers' close presence that they could walk within a few feet of them. Co-author Dr Julie Kern adds: "This habituation allows us to conduct ecologically relevant experiments in the mongooses' natural habitat while collecting incredibly detailed and accurate information."

Closely monitoring the mongooses, the team found that their adaptive responses to predatory cues, such as increased inspection of the cue, vigilance scanning for danger and more time spent near the safety of the burrow, were all disrupted by road-traffic noise.

Related Posts with Thumbnails

ShareThis