The importance of predation and burrow digging in explaining the evolution of sociality is generally unclear. We focused on New World hystricognath rodents to evaluate three key predictions of the predation hypothesis. First, large-bodied surface-dwelling species will be more vulnerable because they are more detectable; thus sociality should be associated with body size. Second, surface-dwellin...

Sniffing, a rhythmic inhalation and exhalation of air through the nose, is a behavior thought to play a critical role in shaping how odor information is represented and processed by the nervous system. Although the mouse has become a prominent model for studying olfaction, little is known about sniffing behavior in mice. Here, we characterized mouse sniffing behavior by measuring intranasal pre...

A bioassay arena was developed to test the response of the Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica Newman (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae), to various plant-derived factors that may influence the selection of oviposition sites. In choice experiments with natural and artificial plant cues, females preferred to lay eggs in ryegrass rather than in artificial resources. Artificial grass stems received more eg...

Kaka (Nestor meridionalis meridionalis) studied in Big Bush State Forest spent 35% of their feeding time digging out Ochrocydus huttoni larvae from live mountain beech trunks (Nothofagus solandri var. cliffortioides). Larvae of O. huttoni had a high energy value compared to that of other insects. The assimilation efficiency for energy of two captive kaka was 91 j: 3% when fed a diet of O. hut/o...

Animals explore their environment to encounter suitable food resources. Despite its vital importance, this behavior puts individuals at risk by consuming limited internal energy during locomotion. We have developed a novel assay to investigate how food-search behavior is organized in Drosophila melanogaster larvae dwelling in hydrogels mimicking their natural habitat. We define three main behav...

Past research has produced evidence that parsing commitments strengthen over the processing of additional linguistic elements that are consistent with the commitments and undoing strong commitments takes more time than undoing weak commitments. It remains unclear, however, whether this so-called digging-in effect is exclusively due to the length of an ambiguous region or at least partly to the ...

Biological monitoring of exposure of workers to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in petrochemical industries was performed by the measurement of urinary excretion of 1-hydroxypyrene. In 121 of the 462 workers studied (both smokers and non-smokers) who had had no recent occupational exposure to PAHs a median 1-hydroxypyrene concentration of 0.21 micrograms/g creatinine was found. The uppe...

We demonstrate the phenomenon of self organized criticality (SOC) in a simple random walk model described by a random walk of a myopic ant. The ant acts on the underlying lattice aiming at uniform digging of the surface but is unaffected by the underlying lattice. In 1-d, 2-d and 3-d we have explored this model and have obtained power laws in the time intervals between consecutive events of ‘di...