In social animals, group efficiency is often assumed to increase with task differentiation, but this requires that individuals are better than generalists at the task they specialize in. A new study finds that individual Anelosimus studiosus spiders do predominantly perform the task they excel at, in line with their individual personality type, when they are placed in groups.

Colleen Cassady St. Clair Department of Biological Sciences University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E9 References Caro T, (ed). 1998. Behavioral ecology and conservation biology. New York: Oxford University Press Clemmons JR, Buchholz R (eds), 1997. Behavioral approaches to conservation in the wild. New York: Cambridge University Press Gosling LM, Sutherland WJ (eds.), 2000. Behav...

We developed an agent-based model of animal behaviour inspired by the model presented in [6]. The original model was expanded to allow the agents to eat and rest. The decisions for state changes are governed by a deterministic finite-state machine. In order to evaluate the validity of this model, we compared simulation results with real data obtained from video footage of different farms. Durin...

Modelling animal behaviour using adaptive mobile robots is a well stabilised methodology that permits to test, in an extremely controlled setting, hypnotises, constrains and assumptions about how organisms orient themselves. We apply this methodology to simulate experiments with rats in open field box. Animal psychologists have used open field box settings in order to empirically show the forma...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.12.005 0003-3472/© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevie license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) In many areas of animal behaviour research, improvements in our ability to collect large and detailed data sets are outstripping our ability to analyse them. These diverse, complex and often highdimensional data sets exhibit nonlinear dependenc...

The particle swarm algorithm contains elements which map fairly strongly to the foraging problem in behavioural ecology. In this paper, we show how some simple adaptions to the standard algorithm can make it well suited for the foraging problem. We propose two approaches to model foraging behaviour: the first uses a standard particle swarm algorithm, with the particles just slowing down in the ...

Animal-borne sensors enable researchers to remotely track animals, their physiological state and body movements. Accelerometers, for example, have been used in several studies to measure body movement, posture, and energy expenditure, although predominantly in marine animals. In many studies, behaviour is often inferred from expert interpretation of sensor data and not validated with direct obs...

a Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Program, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, U.S.A. b Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, U.S.A. c Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, U.S.A. d Department of Biology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, U.S.A. e Department of Biology, University of Okl...