Publications by authors named "M Agro"
Article Synopsis
- Animacy perception is the skill animals use to recognize whether objects are alive, essential for identifying social partners or threats for survival.
- Research indicates that both vertebrates and arthropods demonstrate this perceptual ability, though the term "animacy" has been less frequently used in studies involving arthropods.
- The review highlights evidence of biological motion detection, the use of static visual cues for individual recognition, particularly in paper wasps, and behaviors like thanatosis, where an animal pretends to be dead to manipulate perception of liveliness.
Article Synopsis
- Deficiencies in the electron transport chain (ETC) contribute to mitochondrial diseases, but the reasons for different cellular sensitivities to this disruption are not fully understood.
- This study finds that under ETC inhibition, a different type of tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle is activated to maintain malate levels and produce NADPH, which is crucial for cell function.
- The research highlights how astrocytes, which express specific enzymes like Pyruvate carboxylase (PC) and ME1 more than neurons, demonstrate greater resilience to ETC issues, suggesting potential therapeutic strategies for managing mitochondrial diseases.
Article Synopsis
- Animals, like jumping spiders, handle information overload by focusing on relevant stimuli while ignoring distractions.
- Jumping spiders have eight eyes, including two that can move and six that are fixed, allowing them to optimize their attention.
- Experiments showed that attention is split among their eyes, with each set of eyes compensating for the other by detecting targets in different spatial areas.
Article Synopsis
- Argentine ants are a problematic invasive species, and existing control methods often fail due to insufficient bait consumption.
- Research shows that using caffeine can enhance the ants' learning and navigation skills, leading to better recruitment for toxic baits.
- Experiments revealed that moderate caffeine levels significantly increased the ants' foraging speed, while high doses negated these benefits, suggesting that caffeine could improve bait effectiveness without affecting their homing behavior.
'Biological motion' refers to the distinctive kinematics observed in many living organisms, where visually perceivable points on the animal move at fixed distances from each other. Across the animal kingdom, many species have developed specialized visual circuitry to recognize such biological motion and to discriminate it from other patterns. Recently, this ability has been observed in the distributed visual system of jumping spiders.
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