Animals utilize behavioral signals across a range of different contexts in order to communicate with others and produce probable behavioral outcomes. During play animals frequently adopt action patterns used in other contexts. Researchers have therefore hypothesized that play signals have evolved to clarify communicative intent. One highly stereotyped play signal is the canid play bow, but its ...

Green bridges are used to decrease highly negative impact of roads/highways on wildlife populations and their effectiveness is evaluated by various monitoring methods. Based on the 3-year monitoring of four Croatian green bridges, we compared the effectiveness of three indirect monitoring methods: track-pads, camera traps and active infrared (IR) trail monitoring system. The ability of the meth...

—Information regarding survival and cause-specific mortality of eastern wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) is vital to their management, especially in small or isolated populations. Between January 2003 and August 2005, we used radio telemetry to investigate survival and cause-specific mortality of 87 [44 male (24 adult and 20 juvenile) and 43 female (34 adult and 9 juvenile)] wild t...

The aims of the study were to characterize the cortisol response to immobilization stress in African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) and to investigate the relationship between stress and sociality in these pack-living canids. Ad lib. observations were made on a captive pack of 19 wild dogs. Individuals were classified as either dominant or subordinate. Cardinal and ordinal dominance indices were als...

One way to build larger, more comprehensive phylogenies is to combine the vast amount of phylogenetic information already available. We review the two main strategies for accomplishing this (combining raw data versus combining trees), but employ a relatively new variant of the latter: supertree construction. The utility of one supertree technique, matrix representation using parsimony analysis ...

Parent-offspring conflict theory predicts the emergence of weaning conflict between a mother and her offspring arising from skewed relatedness benefits. Empirical observations of weaning conflict have not been carried out in canids. In a field-based study on free-ranging dogs we observed that nursing/suckling bout durations decrease, proportion of mother-initiated nursing bouts decrease and mot...

BACKGROUND Individual variation in both survival and reproduction has the potential to influence extinction risk. Especially for rare or threatened species, reliable population models should adequately incorporate demographic uncertainty. Here, we focus on an important form of demographic stochasticity: variation in litter sizes. We use terrestrial carnivores as an example taxon, as they are fr...

Recent advances have allowed for both morphological fossil evidence and molecular sequences to be integrated into a single combined inference of divergence dates under the rule of Bayesian probability. In particular, the fossilized birth-death tree prior and the Lewis-Mk model of discrete morphological evolution allow for the estimation of both divergence times and phylogenetic relationships be...