Insect societies are often described as superorganisms, and there are many functional parallels between organisms and superorganisms. Elegant work using ants shows that nutrient regulation, which occurs in many non-social animals, can also occur at the colony-level.

From studies of the effects of drugs on a gamut of physiological regulations or upon the diseased organism, modern pharmacology has increasingly turned to investigations of drug effects on discrete biochemical systems and their intrinsic control mechanisms at the level of ultrastructure. It seems apparent that drugs also affect mechanisms and conditions through which complex behavioral systems ...

This book comprises four volumes, roughly dealing with the four main problems in animal behaviour, namely the causation, development, function and evolution of behaviour. The way in which these four topics were assigned to the different volumes is pragmatic, and there is bound to be some overlap. Nevertheless, we feel that the division of the study of animal behaviour into these four questions,...

We posit a new geometric perspective to define, detect, and classify inherent patterns of collective behaviour across a variety of animal species. We show that machine learning techniques, and specifically the isometric mapping algorithm, allow the identification and interpretation of different types of collective behaviour in five social animal species. These results offer a first glimpse at t...

Bees exposed to vigorous shaking designed to simulate a dangerous event judge ambiguous stimuli as predicting a negative outcome - a 'pessimistic' cognitive bias that is characteristic of anxious or depressed humans and other vertebrates in putative negative emotional states.

The simulation of animal behaviour on a mobile robot is a useful undertaking for roboticists wishing to develop robots for non-predictable domains or with more generality of application than is currently possible. It can also be valuable to ethologists, as a means of testing theories of animal behaviour in a modular manner, repeatably, and with identically`naive' subjects. Not all tasks we woul...

New field-based behavioural experiments show that Ambon damselfish (Pomacentrus amboinensis) use complex UV facial markings, which are invisible to most damselfish predators and to us, to distinguish conspecific and heterospecific fish.