Publications by authors named "T Pike"
Article Synopsis
- - Detection dogs are trained to identify specific scents, such as drugs or explosives, but variations in the scent can occur due to factors like production methods or mixing with other smells.
- - Generalisation, the ability of dogs to recognize similar but different scents, is vital for effective detection work, but it’s harder to predict in smells compared to sounds or sights.
- - This review examines recent findings on generalisation in detection dogs, discusses training methods, points out risks in current practices, and highlights gaps in research that need more attention.
Article Synopsis
- Detection dogs must learn to recognize multiple odors and be able to differentiate them in real-world situations, which depends on their training method.
- Traditional training methods focus on teaching one odor at a time, while research suggests that concurrent training with mixed odors may be more effective.
- A study found that dogs trained with intermixed odors showed better performance in identifying target scents and making fewer mistakes, indicating that this method could improve detection capabilities overall.
Colourful signals have long been implicated as indicators of individual quality in animals. Bare-skin signals are an understudied aspect of avian colouration compared with plumage studies, despite displaying rapid changes in size and colour in response to different environmental or physiological stressors. Even fewer studies have focused on the underlying histology of these structures and the importance this plays in the resulting skin colour.
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- Batesian mimics often do not closely resemble their models, leading to increased predation on those that are less accurate.
- The relaxed selection hypothesis suggests that if the danger of attacking a model is high (like receiving a shock), then it may be okay for mimics to be less accurate while still maintaining some fitness.
- An experiment showed that when the consequences of misclassifying a model as safe were severe, individuals were more cautious and allowed for greater deviations in mimicry before perceived threats justified an attack.
Accurately quantifying an animal's movement is crucial for developing a greater empirical and theoretical understanding of its behaviour, and for simulating biologically plausible movement patterns. However, we have a relatively poor understanding of how animals move at fine temporal scales and in three-dimensional environments. Here, we collected high temporal resolution data on the three-dimensional spatial positions of individual three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), allowing us to derive statistics describing key geometric characteristics of their movement and to quantify the extent to which this varies between individuals.
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