A diagnosis model of parental care: How parents optimize their provisioning strategy in brood reduction?

Altricial birds often display biased preferences in providing parental care for their dependent offspring, especially during food shortages. During this process, such inflexible rules may result in provisioning errors. To demonstrate how parents optimize their provisioning strategies, we proposed a "diagnosis model" of parental care to posit that parents will undergo a diagnosis procedure to test whether selecting against some particular offspring based on phenotype is an optimal strategy.

Responses of a resident group to an outsider in the blue-breasted quail: A paradigm for studying social resettlement of dispersers.

Dispersal is an individual life-history trait that can influence the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of both the source and recipient populations. Current studies of animal dispersal have paid little attention to how the responses of residents in a recipient population affect the social resettlement of dispersers into a new habitat. We addressed this question in the blue-breasted quail by designing an outsider introduction experiment to simulate a scenario of interaction between residents and dispersers.

Adult tiger beetles Cicindela gemmata modify their foraging strategy in different hunting contexts.

Predator-prey interaction has long been an interesting item in the research of animal behaviors. Given that live prey can damage their predators, predators must trade foraging efficiency for safety while hunting, but the extent of this trade-off is not yet clear. Tiger beetles display diversity in their diets and hunting strategies, and hence, they become an ideal system to address how self-security affects foraging efficiency.

Apathy following Bilateral Deep Brain Stimulation of Subthalamic Nucleus and Globus Pallidus Internus in Parkinson's Disease: A Meta-Analysis.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder typically manifested by its motor symptoms. In addition, PD patients also suffer from many nonmotor symptoms (NMSs), such as apathy. Bilateral deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and the globus pallidus internus (GPi) are recommended as therapeutic interventions for PD, given their pronounced benefit in reducing troublesome dyskinesia.