New discoveries in animal behavior and cognition
King penguins are pretty social animals. Not only do they tend to hang out in a big group, but even within the group, they form little sub-groups; cliques of penguins who like to hang out together...
For a change, I thought this week instead of writing about black widow spiders or praying mantids I'd write about an animal I often neglect: humans.
Visual illusions are fun: we know with our rational mind that, for example, these lines are parallel to each other, yet they don't appear that way.
If you're lucky enough, you may have seen a peacock displaying to a female. It's an impressive event to witness: the peacock spreads and ruffles his enormous, brightly coloured tail feathers for a female, who, after checking him out, may choose to mate with him or not...
There are a handful of traits that scientists and philosophers would argue would make us human, including self-awareness and language. Another key part of being human is thought to be our ability to empathize (although I sometimes find myself doubting some humans' abilities to empathize)...
Bowerbirds are perhaps the most intriguing artists of the bird world. Their beautiful constructions are built purely to impress females (they are not nests, as often mistaken to be).
When you read the word `communication', you probably think of language in some form, likely spoken or written. This is because, as humans, we're obsessed with communicating through language; it's likely that an hour doesn’t go by in your day when you don't communicate with someone by phone, email or text...
We usually think about male and female mates getting along pretty well (that's `mate' in the biological sense, not your friendly British/ Australian friend).
The title of this article probably is an overstatement. Perhaps instead it should have been ‘a small subset of people in Reno, and possibly in Vegas (because everything you can think of exists there) celebrated pollinators for a week...
Working in the field of animal behaviour means that around World Cup season it’s hard to avoid being sent links to so-called ‘psychic’ animals that predict the outcome of matches, such as Paul the octopus, Leon the porcupine and Anton the tamarin...
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