The significance of building behavior in the evolution of animal architecture.

Animals make a diverse array of architectures including nests, bowers, roosts, traps, and tools. Much of the research into animal architecture has focused on the analysis of physical properties such as the dimensions and material of the architectures, rather than the behavior responsible for creating these architectures. However, the relationship between the architecture itself and the construction behavior that built it is not straightforward, and overlooking behavior risks obtaining an incomplete or even misleading picture of how animal architecture evolves.

Buzz pollination.

Pritchard and Vallejo-Marín introduce the process and evolution of buzz pollination.

Floral vibrations by buzz-pollinating bees achieve higher frequency, velocity and acceleration than flight and defence vibrations.

Vibrations play an important role in insect behaviour. In bees, vibrations are used in a variety of contexts including communication, as a warning signal to deter predators and during pollen foraging. However, little is known about how the biomechanical properties of bee vibrations vary across multiple behaviours within a species.

Taking an insect-inspired approach to bird navigation.

Navigation is an essential skill for many animals, and understanding how animal use environmental information, particularly visual information, to navigate has a long history in both ethology and psychology. In birds, the dominant approach for investigating navigation at small-scales comes from comparative psychology, which emphasizes the cognitive representations underpinning spatial memory. The majority of this work is based in the laboratory and it is unclear whether this context itself affects the information that birds learn and use when they search for a location.

Why study cognition in the wild (and how to test it)?

An animal's behavior is affected by its cognitive abilities, which are, in turn, a consequence of the environment in which an animal has evolved and developed. Although behavioral ecologists have been studying animals in their natural environment for several decades, over much the same period animal cognition has been studied almost exclusively in the laboratory. Traditionally, the study of animal cognition has been based on well-established paradigms used to investigate well-defined cognitive processes.

Effects of landmark distance and stability on accuracy of reward relocation.

Although small-scale navigation is well studied in a wide range of species, much of what is known about landmark use by vertebrates is based on laboratory experiments. To investigate how vertebrates in the wild use landmarks, we trained wild male rufous hummingbirds to feed from a flower that was placed in a constant spatial relationship with two artificial landmarks. In the first experiment, the landmarks and flower were 0.

Wild, free-living rufous hummingbirds do not use geometric cues in a spatial task.

In the laboratory, many species orient themselves using the geometric properties of an enclosure or array and geometric information is often preferred over visual cues. Whether animals use geometric cues when relocating rewarded locations in the wild, however, has rarely been investigated. We presented free-living rufous hummingbirds with a rectangular array of four artificial flowers to investigate learning of rewarded locations using geometric cues.

Magnetizable antibody-like proteins.

Use of paramagnetic particles to isolate molecules or cells from complex media is well established. Typically, particles are manufactured and coated with a biological molecule that confers specific biorecognition. Incubation of particles with sample and exposure to magnetic fields isolates the species of interest.

A plaintiff attorney's candid view of medical malpractice.

The human dynamics of medical malpractice litigation is more nuanced than many doctors suspect. The purpose of this article is to provide some candid insights into the process. The article presents three subjects that doctors are not likely to learn on their own, even if they read all of the law books or had the misfortune of running the gauntlet of their own medical malpractice lawsuit.