Do bats' social vocalizations conform to Zipf's law and the Menzerath-Altmann law?

The study of vocal communication in non-human animals can uncover the roots of human languages. Recent studies of language have focused on two linguistic laws: Zipf's law and the Menzerath-Altmann law. However, whether bats' social vocalizations follow these linguistic laws, especially Menzerath's law, has largely been unexplored.

Increasing Gender Integration in U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training: Policy Recommendations and Rationales From an Interdisciplinary Study.

Introduction: This article describes alternate models and policy recommendations created by an interdisciplinary team of researchers to increase gender integration at U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) recruit training.

Design Considerations for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Provide Policy Recommendations on Gender-Integrated Recruit Training in the Marine Corps.

Introduction: Recruit training is designed to transform civilians into physically fit military service members, who embody their service's core values and possess military discipline and skills. At the time this research began, the U.S.

Resting posture drives the evolution of agonistic displays in bats.

Agonistic displays are one of the most diverse social behaviors that have important functions in animal's life history. However, their origin and driving factors have largely been unexplored. Here, we evaluated agonistic displays of 71 bat species across 10 families and classified these displays into two categories: (a) boxing displays where a bat attacks its opponent with its wrist and thumb and (b) pushing displays where a bat uses its head or body to hit a rival.

Population-level lateralization of boxing displays enhances fighting success in male Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bats.

Behavioral lateralization with left- and right-hand use is common in the Animal Kingdom and can be advantageous for social species. The existence of a preferential use of the hands during agonistic interactions has been described for a number of invertebrate and vertebrate species. Bats compose the second largest order of mammals.

Acoustic signal dominance in the multimodal communication of a nocturnal mammal.

Multimodal communication in animals is common, and is particularly well studied in signals that include both visual and auditory components. Multimodal signals that combine acoustic and olfactory components are less well known. Multimodal communication plays a crucial role in agonistic interactions in many mammals, but relatively little is known about this type of communication in nocturnal mammals.

Assessing the effect of compounds from plantar foot sweat, nesting material, and urine on social behavior in male mice, Mus musculus.

Home cage aggression causes poor welfare in male laboratory mice and reduces data quality. One of the few proven strategies to reduce aggression involves preserving used nesting material at cage change. Volatile organic compounds from the nesting material and several body fluids not only correlate with less home cage aggression, but with more affiliative allo-grooming behavior.

Selecting auditory alerting stimuli for eagles on the basis of auditory evoked potentials.

Development of wind energy facilities results in interactions between wildlife and wind turbines. Raptors, including bald and golden eagles, are among the species known to incur mortality from these interactions. Several alerting technologies have been proposed to mitigate this mortality by increasing eagle avoidance of wind energy facilities.

Social dynamics of core members in mixed-species bird flocks change across a gradient of foraging habitat quality.

Social associations within mixed-species bird flocks can promote information flow about food availability and provide predator avoidance benefits. The relationship between flocking propensity, foraging habitat quality, and interspecific competition can be altered by human-induced habitat degradation. Here we take a close look at sociality within two ecologically important flock-leader (core) species, the Carolina chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) and tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor), to better understand how degradation of foraging habitat quality affects mixed-species flocking dynamics.

Individuality and function of chemical signals during conflict resolution of a mammal.

Individual recognition via communication signals is a critical component of social behavior, and provides the basis of conflict resolution, territorial behavior, and mate choice. However, the function of chemical signals in mammalian individual recognition and conflict resolution has largely been unexplored despite olfaction being a dominant sensory modality in many mammalian species. Here, we describe behavioral tests designed to evaluate the potential role of forehead gland secretions during conflict related to territorial defense in male Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bats.

A Minimal Framework for Describing Living Systems: A Multi-Dimensional View of Life Across Scales.

The almost limitless complexity of biology has led to two general approaches to understanding biological phenomena. One approach is dominated by reductionism in which high-level phenomena of whole systems are viewed as emerging from relatively simple and generally understood interactions at a substantially lower level. Although this approach is theoretically general, it can become intractable in practice when attempting to simultaneously explain a wide range of systems.

Who's the Boss? Assessing Convergent Validity of Aggression Based Dominance Measures in Male Laboratory Mice, .

Aggression among group housed male mice continues to challenge laboratory animal researchers because mitigation strategies are generally applied at the cage level without a good understanding of how it affects the dominance hierarchy. Aggression within a group is typically displayed by the dominant mouse targeting lower ranking subordinates; thus, the strategies for preventing aggression may be more successful if applied specifically to the dominant mouse. Unfortunately, dominance rank is often not assessed because of time intensive observations or tests.

A community context for aggression? Multi-species audience effects on territorial aggression in two species of Paridae.

Territorial aggression in birds is widely observed and is commonly linked to sex, age, body size, physiology, seasonal cues, food resource, urbanization, and a variety of social contexts including conspecific audience effects. However, little is known about the heterospecific audience effects on territorial aggression.Here, we address an emerging idea that heterospecific audience effects may be pervasive influences in the social lives of free-living birds.

Compounds from plantar foot sweat, nesting material, and urine show strain patterns associated with agonistic and affiliative behaviors in group housed male mice, Mus musculus.

Excessive home cage aggression often results in severe injury and subsequent premature euthanasia of male laboratory mice. Aggression can be reduced by transferring used nesting material during cage cleaning, which is thought to contain aggression appeasing odors from the plantar sweat glands. However, neither the composition of plantar sweat nor the deposits on used nesting material have been evaluated.

Social Communication across Reproductive Boundaries: Hormones and the Auditory Periphery of Songbirds and Frogs.

Most animals experience reproductive transitions in their lives; for example, reaching reproductive maturity or cycling in and out of breeding condition. Some reproductive transitions are abrupt, while others are more gradual. In most cases, changes in communication between the sexes follow the time course of these reproductive transitions and are typically thought to be coordinated by steroid hormones.

Vocal performance reflects individual quality in male Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bats (Hipposideros armiger).

Signals containing parameter trade-offs are likely to be honest indicators of signaler quality because they are difficult to produce. Signals with a trill-rate/bandwidth trade-off have been described for many songbird species, one mouse, and one non-human primate species. However, there were no reports about whether there is a vocal performance trade-off in social calls of bats.

Auditory brainstem responses in weaning pigs and three ages of sows.

Piglet crushing is a devastating welfare concern on swine farms; however, some sows appear unresponsive to a piglet's call. Sow hearing ability is rarely considered despite the extensive body of research performed on crushing. In this study, pigs of four age groups (weaning, = 7; gilts, = 5; 2nd and 3rd parity, = 5; 5th parity and up, = 5) were anesthetized and auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) were performed to measure if pig hearing diminishes with age in a mechanically ventilated barn.

Flocking propensity by satellites, but not core members of mixed-species flocks, increases when individuals experience energetic deficits in a poor-quality foraging habitat.

Mixed-species bird flocks are complex social systems comprising core and satellite members. Flocking species are sensitive to habitat disturbance, but we are only beginning to understand how species-specific responses to habitat disturbance affect interspecific associations in these flocks. Here we demonstrate the effects of human-induced habitat disturbance on flocking species' behavior, demography, and individual condition within a remnant network of temperate deciduous forest patches in Indiana, USA.

The impact of farrowing room noise on sows' reactivity to piglets.

Despite much interest in sow welfare, the impact of the acoustic environment on sow reactivity to her piglets is rarely considered. The objective of this study was to understand the impact of noise produced by mechanical ventilation and other sows on a sow's reactivity to her piglets. Sows were farrowed in one of three environments: 1) with eight other sows exposed to constant fan noise (GROUP-FAN; = 10), 2) alone with fan noise present (ISO-FAN; = 10), and 3) alone without fans running (ISO-QUIET; = 10).

Communication as a fundamental part of machiavellian intelligence.

The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis proposes that individuals in complex social groups require sophisticated social cognition. This hypothesis has advanced our understanding of the complex social lives of animals and how individuals interact with others in their groups. Machiavellian intelligence is the capacity of an individual to alter the behavior of others around it to the individual's own advantage.

Comparison of Vocalization Patterns in Piglets Which Were Crushed to Those Which Underwent Human Restraint.

Though many studies focused on piglet crushing utilizing piglet vocalizations to test sow response, none have verified the properties of test vocalizations against actual crushing events. Ten sows were observed 48 h after parturition, and crushing events were recorded from all sows. When a crushing event occurred, a second piglet within the same litter was used to solicit a vocalization through manual restraint to compare restrained piglets' call properties to those of crushed piglets'.

Mate choice in the eye and ear of the beholder? Female multimodal sensory configuration influences her preferences.

A common assumption in sexual selection studies is that receivers decode signal information similarly. However, receivers may vary in how they rank signallers if signal perception varies with an individual's sensory configuration. Furthermore, receivers may vary in their weighting of different elements of multimodal signals based on their sensory configuration.

Testing a key assumption in animal communication: between-individual variation in female visual systems alters perception of male signals.

Variation in male signal production has been extensively studied because of its relevance to animal communication and sexual selection. Although we now know much about the mechanisms that can lead to variation between males in the properties of their signals, there is still a general assumption that there is little variation in terms of how females process these male signals. Variation between females in signal processing may lead to variation between females in how they rank individual males, meaning that one single signal may not be universally attractive to all females.

The sensory substrate of multimodal communication in brown-headed cowbirds: are females sensory 'specialists' or 'generalists'?

Many animals communicate with multimodal signals. While we have an understanding of multimodal signal production, we know relatively less about receiver filtering of multimodal signals and whether filtering capacity in one modality influences filtering in a second modality. Most multimodal signals contain a temporal element, such as change in frequency over time or a dynamic visual display.