Genomic Introgression Between Critically Endangered and Stable Species of Darwin's Tree Finches on the Galapagos Islands.

Natural hybridisation among rare or endangered species and stable congenerics is increasingly topical for the conservation of species-level diversity under anthropogenic impacts. Evidence for beneficial genes being introgressed into or selected for in hybrids raises concurrent questions about its evolutionary significance. In Darwin's tree finches on the island of Floreana (Galapagos Islands, Ecuador), the Critically Endangered medium tree finch () undergoes introgression with the stable small tree finch (), and hybrids regularly backcross with Earlier studies in 2005-2013 documented an increase in the frequency of hybridisation on Floreana using field-based and microsatellite data.

callsync: An R package for alignment and analysis of multi-microphone animal recordings.

To better understand how vocalisations are used during interactions of multiple individuals, studies are increasingly deploying on-board devices with a microphone on each animal. The resulting recordings are extremely challenging to analyse, since microphone clocks drift non-linearly and record the vocalisations of non-focal individuals as well as noise. Here we address this issue with callsync, an R package designed to align recordings, detect and assign vocalisations to the caller, trace the fundamental frequency, filter out noise and perform basic analysis on the resulting clips.

An automated, data-driven approach to children's social dynamics in space and time.

Most children first enter social groups of peers in preschool. In this context, children use movement as a social tool, resulting in distinctive proximity patterns in space and synchrony with others over time. However, the social implications of children's movements with peers in space and time are difficult to determine due to the difficulty of acquiring reliable data during natural interactions.

Hearing in catfishes: 200 years of research.

Ernst Weber stated in 1819, based on dissections, that the swimbladder in the European wels (, Siluridae) and related cyprinids serves as an eardrum and that the ossicles connecting it to the inner ear function as hearing ossicles similar to mammals. In the early 20th century, K. von Frisch showed experimentally that catfishes and cyprinids (otophysines) indeed hear excellently compared to fish taxa lacking auxiliary hearing structures (ossicles, eardrums).

Mate choice in a promiscuous poison frog.

In many animal species, members of one sex, most often females, exhibit a strong preference for mating partners with particular traits or resources. However, when females sequentially mate with multiple partners, strategies underlying female choice are not very well understood. Particularly, little is known if under such sequential polyandry females mate truly randomly, or if they actively try to spread mating events across multiple partners.

Learned predators enhance biological control via organizational upward and trophic top-down cascades.

Learning is a behavioural change based on memory of previous experiences and a ubiquitous phenomenon in animals. Learning effects are commonly life-stage- and age-specific. In many animals, early life experiences lead to pervasive and persistent behavioural changes.