The most aggressive spider societies are not always the ones that flourish

Date:  March 25, 2019

Source:  McMaster University

Evolutionary biologists at McMaster University who study the social lives and behaviour of colony spiders -- some of which are docile, others aggressive -- have found that the success of their cooperative societies depend on their neighbours.

The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, sheds new light on the evolution of animal groups that organize and hunt together.

"Consider the coordinated attacks of prides of lions or wolves, or the dazzling swirling behaviour of starlings or schools of sardines," says Jonathan Pruitt, an evolutionary biologist and Canada 150 Chair in the McMaster's Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour.

"These societies are able to organize and execute strategies that cannot be produced by single individuals. We wanted to see if the collective traits that enable success might depend on the traits of neighboring groups."

Researchers set out to better understand successful collective hunting practices by studying the African social spider Stegodyphus dumicola (S. dumicola). While colonies of S. dumicola do not compete with one another face to face, a single plant may be home to several colonies, resulting in increased competition for flying prey.

Continued

Silver fox study reveals genetic clues to social behavior

Date:  September 27, 2018

Source:  Cornell University

In 1959, Russian scientists began an experiment to breed a population of silver foxes, selecting and breeding foxes that exhibited friendliness toward people. They wanted to know if they could repeat the adaptations for tameness that must have occurred in domestic dogs. Subsequently they also bred another population of foxes for more aggressive behavior.

After 10 generations, a small fraction of the tame-bred foxes displayed dog-like domesticated behavior when people approached. Over time, an increasing fraction of the foxes showed this friendly behavior.

Now, after more than 50 generations of selective breeding, a new Cornell University-led study compares gene expression of tame and aggressive silver foxes in two areas of the brain, shedding light on genes responsible for social behavior.

The study, published online Sept. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identified genes that were altered in tame animals in two areas of the brain involved with learning and memory.

"That such a radical change in temperament could be accomplished so quickly is truly remarkable," said Andrew Clark, professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell and a senior co-author of the paper.

The research team obtained prefrontal cortex and basal forebrain brain tissue samples of 12 tame and 12 aggressive foxes from the Institute for Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, where the foxes were bred.

Read on  

Pumas found to exhibit behaviors like social animals

Findings could raise questions about all solitary carnivores

Date: October 12, 2017

Source: Panthera

Summary:

Pumas, long known as solitary carnivores, are more social than previously thought, according to a new study. The findings provide the first evidence of complex social strategies in any solitary carnivore -- and may have implications for multiple species, including other wild cats around the world.

Read on  

How new behaviors appear and spread among capuchin monkeys

Date: August 24, 2017

Source: University of California - Los Angeles

Summary:

Older, sociable capuchins are prone to inventing more new types of social behaviors, many of which seem to function either as tests of friendship or displays against enemies. Other behaviors the researchers observed involved games, new ways to interact with infants and novel forms of sexual interaction.

Continued

First mutant ants shed light on evolution of social behavior

Date: August 10, 2017

Source: Rockefeller University

Summary:

Scientists disrupted a gene essential for sensing pheromones, resulting in severe deficiencies in the ants' social behaviors and their ability to survive within a colony.

Continued

Habitat features and social behavior impact how baboons move as a group

Date: January 31, 2017

Source: eLife

When deciding what path to take during collective movement, individual baboons will likely follow the road most travelled by their group mates, according to new findings published in eLife.

The study also suggests that environmental factors, such as roads and the vegetation density of their habitat, play a key role in how baboons move together as a group.

To investigate this behaviour, researchers from the US and Germany tracked 25 wild olive baboons belonging to a single troop with second-by-second global positioning system (GPS) tracking at the Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia, Kenya. They also used drone-based imaging technology to provide a high-resolution, three-dimensional reconstruction of the physical and vegetation structure of the baboons' environment. The data were then combined with a modelling system to help predict the animals' steps.

These methods reveal for the first time how the habitats of baboons and the animals' social interactions (in particular their tendency to follow each other closely) combine to influence the movements of individuals in a troop and ultimately determine the overall group structure.

They show that the most important predictor of baboons' decisions about where to move is where other troop members have gone in the recent past -- specifically, within the last five minutes. The more baboons have walked through a certain spot in this time, the more attractive it is to individuals.

Continued

Orphaned Baby Chimps Suffer Lasting Social Effects

by Lindsay Dodgson, Live Science Contributor | January 13, 2016 10:27am ET

Being orphaned as a baby may have a bigger impact on chimpanzees than was previously thought, a new study finds. Scientists found that when infant chimpanzees were taken from their parents, the chimps groomed fellow animals considerably less in later life.

A team of Austrian and Dutch researchers observed chimpanzees that had been caged by themselves for decades in biomedical labs; the scientists also observed individuals that had been orphaned but grew up socially in a zoo community. The researchers already knew that the social behaviors of former lab chimpanzees differ based on the age they were taken away from their mothers, so the scientists wanted to compare these effects with chimps that were orphaned but reared around other animals in a zoo.

Continued ...

Sound Communication and Social Behavior in an Amazonian River Turtle (Podocnemis expansa) - via Herp Digest

Herpetologica

Vol. 70, Issue 2 (Jun 2014)

Camila Rudge Ferrara ^1,2,3, Richard C. Vogt ^1,2,4,7, Renata S. Sousa-Lima ⁵, Bruno M.R. Tardio ⁶, and Virginia Campos Diniz Bernardes ^1,3,4

¹ Centro de Estudos de Quelônios da Amazônia, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Amazon, Brazil, 69083-220

² Associação de Ictiólogos e Herpetólogos da Amazônia—AIHA, Amazonas, Brazil, 69083-220

³ Wildlife Conservation Society—Brazil, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil

⁴  Coordenação de Biodiversidade, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia—INPA, Rua André Araújo, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, 69067-375

⁵  Laboratório de Bioacústica, Departamento de Fisiologia, Centro de Biociências/Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, RN—Brasil and Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA

⁶ Instituto Chico Mendes- ICMBio, Brazil

⁷ Correspondence: e-mail, vogt@inpa.gov.br or richard@pq.cnpq.br

Associate Editor: Ryan Taylor

 Abstract:

The social behavior of turtles during the nesting season can be attributed to a series of functions such as reducing predation, increasing hatchling survivorship, and information exchange between nesting females. However, the mechanism(s) used to remain in a group during the different phases of nesting behavior has yet to be explained. The objective of this study is to document the sounds produced by Giant South American River Turtle, Podocnemis expansa, during the nesting period, and identify how acoustic mechanisms might facilitate social behavior and group aggregation during this period. >From September 2009 to October 2011, the sound repertoire of P. expansa was identified during the nesting period, which begins with the migration of the turtles from the flooded forests to the nesting beaches and terminates when the hatchlings emerge and the females migrate with the hatchlings to the flooded forests. Sounds were recorded when the turtles were active in different behavioral patterns (1) migrating; (2) aggregating in front of the nesting beaches before basking; (3) nesting at night; (4) waiting in the water without nesting or after they have nested; and (5) waiting for the arrival of the hatchlings. We observed six types of sound in the recordings of turtles made during the nesting period. These data indicate that this species is social, and that sound plays an important role in the synchronization of the activities of groups during the nesting season.

Accepted: January 7, 2014

Keywords: Giant South American River Turtle, Migration, Nesting, Underwater vocalizations

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Sibling cooperation in earwig families provides clues to the early evolution of social behavior

Date:

April 15, 2014

Source:

Universität Mainz

Summary:

Looking at the question of how social behavior has developed over the course of evolution, scientists have gained new insights from the study of earwigs. "Young earwig offspring don't simply compete for food. Rather the siblings share what is available amongst themselves, especially when the mother is absent," explained one of the researchers.

Read on

Chimpanzees of a Feather Sit Together: Friendships Are Based On Similar Personalities

Oct. 9, 2013 — Like humans, many animals have close and stable friendships. However, until now, it has been unclear what makes particular individuals bond. Cognitive Biologists of the University of Vienna, Austria, and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, explored the question and found that chimpanzees choose their friendships based on similarity of personality.

The results of this study appear in the scientific journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.

Jorg Massen (University of Vienna) and Sonja Koski (University of Zurich) together measured chimpanzee personality in two zoos with behavioural experiments and years of observations of chimpanzee behaviour. They also carefully logged which chimpanzee sat in body contact with whom most. "This is a clear sign of friendship among chimpanzees," explains Jorg Massen. Subsequently, the researchers tested, if those chimpanzees who sit together frequently have similar or different personality types.

"We found that, especially among unrelated friends, the most sociable and bold individuals preferred the company of other highly sociable and bold individuals, whereas shy and less sociable ones spent time with other similarly aloof and shy chimpanzees," says the researcher. The researchers argue that such a strong preference for self-like individuals is probably adaptive, because frequent cooperation becomes more reliable when both partners have similar behavioural tendencies and emotional states.

This finding strongly resembles the known "similarity effect" in humans: We tend to make friends with people who are equally extraverted, friendly and bold as ourselves. "It appears that what draws and keeps both chimpanzee and human friends together is similarity in gregariousness and boldness, suggesting that preference for self-like friends dates back to our last common ancestor," ends Jorg Massen.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131009100225.htm

Pets May Help Kids With Autism Develop Social Skills

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Introducing a pet into the home of a child with autismmay help that child develop improved social behaviors, new research finds.

The study, from French researchers, is the first strong scientific evidence that animals may help foster social skills in individuals with autism, but it also reinforces what clinicians have been hearing anecdotally for years.

"We hear from parents a lot that having a pet or interacting with an animal really helps their child's social behavior, but there hasn't been a study so far that has looked at that scientifically," said Alycia Halladay, director of environmental research at Autism Speaks. "This offers some intriguing evidence to confirm what parents have been saying."

Halladay was not involved with the study, which was published online Aug. 1 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Problems with communication are one of the hallmarks of autism and strategies to combat this are central to autism therapy.

According to Halladay, some people with autism use service dogs but usually to address a particular handicap, such as problems with motor coordination or hearing loss, although not yet for social skills.

Previous studies have verified that having a pet in the house actually improves family bonding and can improve the social skills of a non-autistic child as he or she learns to share with the pet and care for it.

To see if pets might have the same effect in children with autism, the study authors compared the children's social interactions (as reported by the parents of the children with autism) in three different settings: households that had never had a pet; homes that had had a pet since the child's birth; and households that had acquired a pet after the child turned 5.

Read on:  http://news.yahoo.com/pets-may-help-kids-autism-develop-social-skills-210511988.html?_esi=1

Goodness Snakes! Sociable Rattlers Cuddle With Their Kin

Though often regarded as loners, rattlesnakes may be relatively social, cuddling up with their relatives, a finding that suggests serpents may have more complex social lives than currently appreciated, researchers say.

Timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) had long been thought to be solitary creatures, though recent studies have suggested their social lives might be more complex. For instance, rattlesnakes in captivity preferentially associate with relatives and use the scents of their kin to guide them on where to forage and dwell.

To learn more about how sociable the snakes might actually be, scientists analyzed the genetic closeness of related clusters of the wild serpents.

Timber rattlesnakes living in the northeastern United States dwell in communal dens in the winter. They emerge in the spring, bask in the sun for several days at rock outcrops, and then migrate to surrounding areas to forage and mate. When pregnant, females do not undergo summer migrations, but instead bask at rookeries before giving birth in the autumn. Females in the rookeries often cluster together in groups of six or more, as do snakes at basking sites on occasion.

Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/18577-rattlesnakes-social-animals-kin.html

Bats only roost with their closest buddies

Bats prefer to rest with their closest pals rather than with bats they don't know very well, researchers have discovered.

They found that although bats change where they sleep every few days, they nearly always roost with the same bunch of bats, forming tight-knit social groups with exclusive membership.

'Bats build long-term companionships with other individuals, and these companions are members of exclusive social groups that can last for many years,' explains Tom August from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), who's studying the bats as part of his PhD at the University of Exeter.
'I was interested in fitting together disease and ecology, and wanted to know if the ecology of bats influences the diseases they carry,' he says.

Despite being cute-looking creatures, a very small number of UK bats carry rabies-like viruses. They can also be the source of emerging diseases. 'The SARS virus is thought to have originated from bats in China,' says August.

By getting a better understanding of how individual bats interact with each other, researchers are hoping to predict how diseases might spread, 'which may point to ways in which the risks to humans can be reduced.'

Bat numbers have dropped dramatically in recent years, because of loss of habitat. They like roosting in buildings and trees, and during the winter, tend to hibernate in caves. All bats in the UK are protected species.

Bat experts have long known that they often rest together: males roost on their own, or sometimes in small groups; while female bats establish so-called maternity colonies around June when many soon-to-be mothers come together to have their pups.

But this is the first time researchers have shown that bats form exclusive social groups – at least in the UK.

By revealing how bats stick together in distinct social groups, the research shows that conservation efforts should focus on whole areas used by groups, rather than just single roosts.

August and colleagues from CEH and the University of Exeter studied the hundreds of bats that live in Wytham Woods, just outside Oxford in the UK.

Around 200 Daubenton's and 200 Natterer's bats live in the woods, making use of some of the 1200 bird boxes which have been there for the last 40 or 50 years. Birds use them early in the season, but as soon as they leave, the bats move in.

Wytham Woods is owned by the University of Oxford and is probably the most heavily-studied woodland in the UK. Indeed all of the bats are fitted with tiny aluminium arm bands with unique numbers to make identifying them easier.

'The fact that bats change their roosts so frequently means this kind of study has been difficult up until now,' says August.

After taking meticulous notes of which bats associate with each other, August built up a 'spider-web' diagram to reveal the bats' social networks.

'Instead of a huge spider web, you get clusters, which clearly show how individual bats associate with each other,' August says. 'In this one wood, we found six or seven social groups.'

Groups appear to be made up of around 20 to 40 individuals. 'It could be that they're coming together to share information about where food is,' says August.

The study will be presented to delegates of the British Ecological Society's annual meeting in Sheffield today.

by Tamera Jones
http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=1062

Chimpanzees' 66 gestures revealed

Thursday, 5 May 2011
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other, according to scientists.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland filmed a group of the animals in order to decipher this "gestural repertoire".

The team then studied 120 hours of footage of the chimps interacting, looking for signs that the animals were intentionally signalling to each other.

The findings are published in the journal Animal Cognition.

Previous studies on captive chimps have suggested the animals have about 30 different gestures.

"So this [result] shows quite a large repertoire," lead researcher Dr Catherine Hobaiter told BBC News.

"We think people previously were only seeing fractions of this, because when you study the animals in captivity you don't see all their behaviour.

"You wouldn't see them hunting for monkeys, taking females away on 'courtships', or encountering neighbouring groups of chimpanzees."

Dr Hobaiter spent 266 days observing and filming a group of chimpanzees in Budongo Conservation Field Station, Uganda.

"I've spent two years studying these animals, so they know me," she said. "I follow them through the forest and they just ignore me completely and get on with their daily lives."

She and her colleague, Professor Richard Byrne, scrutinised the footage and categorised each distinct gesture.

They looked for clear signs that the animals were making deliberate movements that were intended to generate a response from another animal.

"We looked to see if the gesturer was looking at their audience," explained Professor Byrne.

"And we looked for persistence; if their action did not produce a result, they would repeat it."

The team is still studying the footage for the next stage of their project - to figure out what each gesture means.

For some of these gestures, the meaning seems obvious to us, perhaps because - as great apes- we make similar movements. A chimp will often beckon to another group member, or a youngster will hand shake at another juvenile to entice it to play.

Gesture dictionary

In one piece of footage captured by Dr Hobaiter, a mother reaches with her left arm towards her daughter.

"The mother wants to move away and is gesturing to request that her daughter 'climbs on' her," Dr Hobaiter explained.

"She could just grab her daughter, but she doesn't. She reaches and holds the gesture while waiting for a response."

When the youngster starts to approach, the mother repeats the gesture and adds a facial expression - a "bare-teeth grin", at which point the daughter climbs on and they move away.

"But actions often have effects that their maker did not intend," said Professor Byrne.

"So to understand the intended meaning, it's no good just discovering a gesture's typical effect. We have to look for what effect makes the signaller stop gesturing and appear satisfied and content with the outcome, to be sure that that was what they intended."

The results have provided clues about the origins of chimps' gestures, suggesting that they are a common system of communication across the species, rather than each movement being a learned custom or ritual within one social group.

In fact, by comparing these observations with those of gestures made by gorillas and orangutans, the researchers showed there was significant overlap in the signals used throughout the family of great apes.

Dr Hobaiter said: This supports our belief that the gestures that apes use (and maybe some human gestures too) are derived from ancient shared ancestry of all the great ape species alive today."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9475000/9475408.stm