Determination of when and where animals feed and how much they consume is fundamental to understand their ecology and role in ecosystems. However, the lack of reliable data on feeding habits of wild animals, and particularly in marine endotherms, attests to the difficulty in doing this. A promising recent development proposes using a Hall sensor-magnet system, the inter-mandibular angle sensor ...

Recognising objects goes beyond vision, and requires models that incorporate different aspects of meaning. Most models focus on superordinate categories (e.g., animals, tools) which do not capture the richness of conceptual knowledge. We argue that object recognition must be seen as a dynamic process of transformation from low-level visual input through categorical organisation to specific conc...

While over-dispersion in capture–recapture studies is well known to lead to poor estimation of population size, current diagnostic tools to detect the presence of heterogeneity have not been specifically developed for capture–recapture studies. To address this, a simple and efficient method of testing for over-dispersion in zero-truncated count data is developed and evaluated. The proposed meth...

ABSTRACT Following behavior is a well-documented foraging specialization in Neotropical birds, which consists of individuals solitary or mixed-flocking species following other moving animals to capture fleeing prey. Here, we report two observations the cryptic forest-falcon, Micrastur mintoni troops primates during an ornithological inventory eastern Brazilian Amazon. During both observations, ...

The motion dazzle hypothesis posits that high contrast geometric patterns can cause difficulties in tracking a moving target and has been argued to explain the patterning of animals such as zebras. Research date only tested small number patterns, offering equivocal support for hypothesis. Here, we take genetic programming approach allow evolve based on their fitness (time taken capture) thus fi...

As delphinid populations become increasingly exposed to human activities we rely on our capacity to produce accurate abundance estimates upon which to base management decisions. This study applied mark-recapture methods following the Robust Design to estimate abundance, demographic parameters, and temporary emigration rates of an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) population off...

Many vertebrates are efficient hunters and recognize their prey by innate neural mechanisms. During prey capture, the internal representation of the prey's location must be constantly updated and made available to premotor neurons that convey the information to spinal motor circuits. We studied the neural substrate of this specialized visuomotor system using high-speed video recordings of larva...

When direct counts are not possible, relative population size indices, based on animal activity (e.g. number of tracks, burrows, feces, calls per unit area), are sometimes the only tools available to investigate population size variations over time. In sea turtles, the number of clutches laid on a nesting beach in a particular season is commonly used as a relative index of population density. T...