Brain size affects responsiveness in mating behaviour to variation in predation pressure and sex ratio.

Despite ongoing advances in sexual selection theory, the evolution of mating decisions remains enigmatic. Cognitive processes often require simultaneous processing of multiple sources of information from environmental and social cues. However, little experimental data exist on how cognitive ability affects such fitness-associated aspects of behaviour.

Hysteretic dynamics of active particles in a periodic orienting field.

Active motion of living organisms and artificial self-propelling particles has been an area of intense research at the interface of biology, chemistry and physics. Significant progress in understanding these phenomena has been related to the observation that dynamic self-organization in active systems has much in common with ordering in equilibrium condensed matter such as spontaneous magnetization in ferromagnets. The velocities of active particles may behave similar to magnetic dipoles and develop global alignment, although interactions between the individuals might be completely different.

Tricritical points in a Vicsek model of self-propelled particles with bounded confidence.

We study the orientational ordering in systems of self-propelled particles with selective interactions. To introduce the selectivity we augment the standard Vicsek model with a bounded-confidence collision rule: a given particle only aligns to neighbors who have directions quite similar to its own. Neighbors whose directions deviate more than a fixed restriction angle α are ignored.