Tag: Odour

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Food or family?

Food or family?

Learning to distinguish kin

is hard with prey near.

 

The benefits of recognising your relatives are many and in cannibalistic species can include avoiding eating members of your own family. Learning kin cues frequently occurs early in life when a number of other cues need to also be learnt, including food cues.

Christiansen and Schausberger (2017) found that predatory mites raised with only their relatives were able to distinguish between related and unrelated larvae. This distinction was not made by mites reared in the presence of relatives and food cues.

The presence of food cues interfered with the learning of kin cues, yet the presence of kin cues did not disrupt the learning of food cues. This suggests that if food is present the mites will learn to identify it, however if there is no food and the mites may need to resort to cannibalism then they learn to avoid eating their own relatives.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.09.005

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Their noses know

How do shearwaters

navigate across oceans?

Their noses know ¿no?

 

Many birds travel hundreds of miles across oceans with no obvious sign posts to help them find their way. So how do they navigate?

Padget et al (2017) manipulated the olfactory ability of shearwaters and then tracked them as they made free-ranging foraging trips across the Mediterranean Sea. Shearwaters that were anosmic behaved as normal whilst foraging but on their return trips they were not oriented towards their colony – they found the coastline within 40 km from their colony and travelled the rest of the way along the coast. In contrast the control birds found their colony with a significantly greater degree of accuracy. This suggests that shearwaters use an olfactory map to navigate across open water successfully.

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Immigrant crabs

Immigrant tree crabs

Move from mangrove to salt marsh

…but it’s not the same.

 

Mangrove tree crabs have responded to climate change by moving northwards into a novel habitat: salt marsh. The crabs used to show site fidelity in their historic habitat but the faecal cues they used for this are now often washed away in the salt marsh which is regularly flooded. Climate change may therefore be indirectly affecting foraging behaviour and predation risk. Cannizzo & Griffen, 2016.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.08.025

 

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Fight, flight or pee

To fight, flight or pee?

That is the question for the

Aggressive cichlid.

 

Aggressive interactions between individuals can be dangerous and energetically expensive and it is important that the two competitors are able to communicate effectively to avoid such costs. When competing cichlid fish engage in agonistic interactions they are known to communicate via visual cues, but new findings suggest they also use chemical cues by urinating during encounters. Bayani et al, 2017.

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Road-safety

Road-safety crucial:

Engine noises distract from

predator odours.

 

Noise pollution can have a number of effects on wild animals. Morris-Drake et al (2016) found that road noises meant that dwarf mongooses were slower to detect a predator odour and did not increase vigilance in response to the odour (whilst mongooses exposed to normal ambient noise found the odour faster and showed increased vigilance).