The Effect of Tyre and Road Wear Particles on the Terrestrial Isopod .

(1) Car tyre microplastic particles (TMPs) significantly contribute to global microplastic pollution, with an estimated annual production of 6 million tonnes. However, the impact of TMPs, particularly tyre and road wear particles (TRWPs), resulting from tyre abrasion on the road on terrestrial organisms, is poorly understood. This study investigated the effects of TMPs and TRWPs on the growth, immune response, behaviour, and cognition of the woodlouse over 30 days; (2) TMPs and TRWPs were mixed together in the first experiment and provided at different concentrations of 1.

Artificial light at night alters risk-related behaviors of the ground-dwelling isopod Porcellionids pruinosus.

Artificial light at night (ALAN) has emerged as a significant ecological disruptor, affecting various behavioral and physiological processes in numerous species. This study investigated the impact of ALAN on the risk-related behaviors and activity patterns of the ground-dwelling isopod, Porcellionides pruinosus. Isopods were exposed to three different illuminance conditions (<0.

When sounds come alive: animacy in the auditory sense.

Despite the interest in animacy perception, few studies have considered sensory modalities other than vision. However, even everyday experience suggests that the auditory sense can also contribute to the recognition of animate beings, for example through the identification of voice-like sounds or through the perception of sounds that are the by-products of locomotion. Here we review the studies that have investigated the responses of humans and other animals to different acoustic features that may indicate the presence of a living entity, with particular attention to the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying such perception.

Chicks produce consonant, sometimes jazzy, sounds.

Several animal species prefer consonant over dissonant sounds, a building block of musical scales and harmony. Could consonance and dissonance be linked, beyond music, to the emotional valence of vocalizations? We extracted the fundamental frequency from calls of young chickens with either positive or negative emotional valence, i.e.

Goal-directed behavior in Tenebrio molitor larvae.

Can signs of intentional behavior be traced in an insect larva, traditionally thought to be driven only by mere reflexes? We trained Tenebrio molitor coleoptera larvae in a uniform Y-maze to prefer one target branch to get access to food, observing their ability to learn and retain access to the reward-associated side for up to 24 h. During reward devaluation, the reward food (experimental group) and a different food (control group) were paired with an aversive stimulus in a new environment. When tested again in the Y-maze, mealworms of the experimental group significantly reduced their visits to the target branch, whereas mealworms of the control group did not.

Exhibits Interindividual Differences in Behavioural and Problem-Solving Performance.

By presenting individual with an extractive foraging problem with a puzzle box, we examined the possible correlation between behavioural performances (e.g., ease of adaptation to captive conditions, prevalence of neophobic and neophilic behaviours, and propensity to learn individually or by observing conspecifics), biotic (body and brain size, age, sex) and abiotic (seasonality and place of origin) factors.

Unlocking the symmetric transfer of irrelevant information: gene-environment interplay and enhanced interhemispheric cross-talk.

Hemispheric specialization influences stimulus processing and behavioural control, affecting responses to relevant stimuli. However, most sensory input is irrelevant and must be filtered out to prevent interference with task-relevant behaviour, a process known as habituation. Despite habituation's vital role, little is known about hemispheric specialization for this brain function.

Individual differences in habituation: Innate covariation between habituation, exploration, and body size in naïve chicks (Gallus gallus).

Habituation to novel stimuli has been associated with behavioural differences among individuals in numerous animal species. Because the habituation mechanisms depend on previous experiences with a stimulus, one would expect individuals to develop their habituation capacity based on the life experiences that also shape their behavioural traits. And indeed, in adult lizards, exploratory behaviour and body size correlates with habituation.

Cephalopod Behavior: From Neural Plasticity to Consciousness.

It is only in recent decades that subjective experience - or consciousness - has become a legitimate object of scientific inquiry. As such, it represents perhaps the greatest challenge facing neuroscience today. Subsumed within this challenge is the study of subjective experience in non-human animals: a particularly difficult endeavor that becomes even more so, as one crosses the great evolutionary divide between vertebrate and invertebrate phyla.

Young domestic chicks spontaneously represent the absence of objects.

Absence is a notion that is usually captured by language-related concepts like zero or negation. Whether nonlinguistic creatures encode similar thoughts is an open question, as everyday behavior marked by absence (of food, of social partners) can be explained solely by expecting presence somewhere else. We investigated 8-day-old chicks' looking behavior in response to events violating expectations about the presence or absence of an object.

Context-Specific Habituation: A Review.

Habituation consists of the progressive response decrement to a repeated stimulation, a response decline that is not accounted for by sensory or motor fatigue. Together with sensitization, habituation has been traditionally considered to be a prototypical example of non-associative learning, being affected only by the features of the stimulation, as for instance its intensity or frequency. However, despite this widespread belief, evidence exists showing that habituation can be specific to the context of the stimulation, thus suggesting that habituation can have an associative nature.

Medium-term feasibility of the management of the invasive crayfish Procambarus clarkii with the sterile males release technique.

Background: The sterile male release technique (SMRT) is a useful method applied for controlling invasive and pest species. However, the use of X-rays can lead to negative effects on the survival and health conditions of sterilized males.

Results: This study was set up to evaluate the functional integrity of physiological, morphological and behavioural responses in males of the red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii (Girard, 1852), exposed to a dose of 40 Gy of ionizing radiation.

Long-lasting generalization triggered by a single trial event in the invasive crayfish .

Behavioural flexibility allows adaptation to environmental changes, a situation that invasive species have often to face when colonizing new territories. Such flexibility arises from a set of cognitive mechanisms among which generalization plays a key role, as it allows the transfer of past solutions to solve similar new problems. By means of a habituation paradigm, we studied generalization in the invasive crayfish Once crayfish had habituated their defensive response to a specific water jet, we tested whether habituation transferred to a new type of water jet.

A standardized battery of tests to measure Octopus vulgaris' behavioural performance.

Here we introduce a series of behavioural tasks to assess inter-individual variability in behaviours exhibited by the cephalopod mollusc Octopus vulgaris. We propose that, by using octopus' predatory behavioural response, it is possible to measure: (1) the ability to adapt to the captive condition (acclimatization), (2) the response towards novel stimuli (neophobia), (3) the capability of social learning, (4) the ability of solving problems (problem solving), and (5) the response to artificial stimuli (preferences, individual learning). To assure comparability and reproducibility of results, this battery of tests is here applied to a large sample of individuals in standardized experimental conditions.

Distinct effect of early and late embryonic light-stimulation on chicks' lateralization.

Embryonic light exposure affects similarly functional lateralization in fish and birds. While the light acts on an asymmetric habenular system during the first post fertilization hours in zebrafish, in the domestic chicks it shapes the thalamofugal visual pathway affecting the right retinal photoreceptors in the last stages before hatching. However, recent evidence has shown that also in chicks a precocial embryonic time window seems open to light action.

Context learning before birth: evidence from the chick embryo.

Learning contextual information to form associative memories with stimuli of interest is an important brain function in both human and non-human animals. Intuitively, one would expect that such a sophisticated cognitive skill develops postnatally, as the organism starts exploring the surrounding environment to search for significant contingencies among stimuli. Here we show, instead, that even before hatching, domestic chicks are capable of forming associative memories between discrete alerting sounds and the surrounding context, as attested by the fact that habituation of the freezing response to the sounds is affected by the context of stimulation.

Short-term memory in habituation and dishabituation of newborn chicks' freezing response.

Cognitive models of habituation and dishabituation postulate that the latter is attributable to the perturbation of the model of the repeated stimulation stored in short-term memory (STM) by the occurrence of a new stimulus, called dishabituator. However, although both behavioral phenomena depend on STM, previous studies in Aplysia have found that dishabituation seems to require further steps of development of the STM system to emerge. Here, we addressed whether this is a universal condition for the appearance of the 2 forms of learning, namely whether dishabituation must necessarily follow habituation.

Naïve 3-day-old domestic chicks (Gallus gallus) are attracted to discrete acoustic patterns characterizing natural vocalizations.

Nonsongbirds can produce rhythmical sounds that, at times, have been shown to be meaningful in their communication. This raises the possibility that rhythm is a separate ability that might have evolved earlier than song. We asked whether nearly completely naïve domestic chicks perceive rhythm and respond in specific ways to different rhythmic patterns.

Rapid plasticity attenuation soon after birth revealed by habituation in newborn chicks.

Habituation reflects a form of experience-dependent plasticity whereby the organism progressively learns to ignore the irrelevant information repeatedly encountered. Here, we measured the freezing response to a repeated loud noise in three groups of newborn chicks (Gallus gallus) of different ages (1-2 Day old, 2-3 Day old, and 3-4 Day old) to investigate the ontogeny of habituation in this avian species. Habituation was already present 1 Day after hatching, revealing that the neural mechanisms underlying this form of plasticity are immediately active.

Context-specific habituation of the freezing response in newborn chicks.

Previous studies have found that in mature animals habituation is context-specific in some species but not in others. Given the mixed evidence present in the literature, we decided to explore whether habituation is context-specific in newborn chicks. The results showed that 3 days after hatching, chicks were capable of using global contextual information to rapidly habituate their freezing response to a series of sudden acoustic stimuli.

Inexperienced newborn chicks use geometry to spontaneously reorient to an artificial social partner.

A fundamental process underlying navigation behaviour, shown to occur in every species tested, uses geometric properties of the environment for location memory and orientation. Here we employ a new method to ask whether this basic geometric orientation ability is innately predisposed in the brain or depends on specific experiences navigating in a geometrically rich environment. Using the newborn domestic chick as a model system, we present a working memory task testing reorientation towards a filial imprinting object under rigorous controlled rearing conditions.

Visual hierarchical processing and lateralization of cognitive functions through domestic chicks' eyes.

Hierarchical stimuli have proven effective for investigating principles of visual organization in humans. A large body of evidence suggests that the analysis of the global forms precedes the analysis of the local forms in our species. Studies on lateralization also indicate that analytic and holistic encoding strategies are separated between the two hemispheres of the brain.