Was the spider’s web you found very intricate and shiny? Do you know that this could indicate several things about the spider and it’s apprehension of the environment around it?
Animals are known to use conspicuous visual signals too allure prey or deter predators. Using colors, glossiness, ornaments are some of the well known visual signals. Sometimes the colors are used to advertise to the predators about unpalatability or harmfulness. These signals may have a cost, for example metabolic expenditure and generating the color pigment. Visual signals used to attract prey could also land up attracting predators and thus involves a trade off based on the situation.
Birds spend an average of 9.2% of a day in maintenance behavior and water bathing is an important element of it followed by preening and oiling. Researchers have attempted to decipher if this bathing affects their flight performance and have made some interesting observations.
As a part of their various experiments a group of researchers from UK noticed that, newly caught and handled birds tend to immediately bath in fresh water following the release into a cage. This observation prompted to believe that the bathing followed by preening was done to repair the feathers disrupted by the catching and handling. However proving that would be impossible, as analyzing the feather after the bathing and preening would again disrupt the repaired feathers. So, they tested to see the direct influence of bathing on the flight performance.
New research has demonstrated that one of our two closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee can settle conflicts of interest over resources in mutually satisfying ways – even without the social norms of equity, planned strategies of reciprocity, and the complex communication characteristic of human negotiation.
Dr. Alicia Melis from the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany has been conducting various experiments with chimpanzees. An article recently published in the journal “Evolution and Human Behavior” authored by Dr. Melis has shed light on the various intricate negotiating capabilities of chimpanzees.
Basic cooperation among social species in aspects like travel direction or activity timing has long been documented however solving conflicts on resources like food have had very little research. Dr. Melis and team, trained a group of chimps on various aspects including the importance of cooperation. The chimps were taught that cooperation benefits both. The chimps were also paired containing a dominant partner and a subordinate partner. Most of these chimps had been already involved in cooperation oriented experiments. Here is a clip which demonstrates how chimps are demonstrated the importance of cooperation.
