Proactive and reactive movement behaviours shape the antipredator sequence in a large herbivore.

Background: Prey species can display antipredator movement behaviours to reduce predation risk, including proactive responses to chronic or predictable risk, and reactive responses to acute or unpredictable risk. Thus, at any given time, prey movement choice may reflect a trade-off between proaction and reaction. In previous studies, proaction and reaction have generally been considered separately, which neglects their potentially simultaneous influence on animal movement decisions and overall space use.

The use of social information in vulture flight decisions.

Animals rely on a balance of personal and social information to decide when and where to move next in order to access a desired resource. The benefits from cueing on conspecifics to reduce uncertainty about resource availability can be rapidly overcome by the risks of within-group competition, often exacerbated toward low-ranked individuals. Being obligate soarers, relying on thermal updraughts to search for carcasses around which competition can be fierce, vultures represent ideal models to investigate the balance between personal and social information during foraging movements.

Between forest and croplands: Nocturnal behavior in wild chimpanzees of Sebitoli, Kibale National Park, Uganda.

Some animal species have been presumed to be purely diurnal. Yet, they show flexibility in their activity rhythm, and can occasionally be active at night. Recently, it has been suggested that chimpanzees may rarely engage in nocturnal activities in savannah forests, in contrast to the frequent nocturnal feeding of crops observed at Sebitoli, Kibale National Park, Uganda.

Foraging efficiency in temporally predictable environments: is a long-term temporal memory really advantageous?

Cognitive abilities enabling animals that feed on ephemeral but yearly renewable resources to infer resources are available may have been favoured by natural selection, but the magnitude of the benefits brought by these abilities remains poorly known. Using computer simulations, we compared the efficiencies of three main types of foragers with different abilities to process temporal information, in spatially and/or temporally homogeneous or heterogeneous environments. One was endowed with a memory, which stores recent experience about the availability of the different food types.

Using natural travel paths to infer and compare primate cognition in the wild.

Within comparative psychology, the evolution of animal cognition is typically studied either by comparing indirect measures of cognitive abilities (e.g., relative brain size) across many species or by conducting batteries of decision-making experiments among (typically) a few captive species.

Handedness in gestural and manipulative actions in male hunter-gatherer Aka pygmies from Central African Republic.

Objectives: All human populations display a right-biased handedness. Nonetheless, if studies on western populations are plenty, investigations of traditional populations living at subsistence levels are rare. Yet, understanding the geographical variation of phenotypes of handedness is crucial for testing evolutionary hypotheses.