Although today there is a wide acceptance that both genetics and environmental experiences define an animal’s behavior, at one time it was thought that perhaps environmental experience alone determined an animal’s behavior. Some of the first definitive work, published by Tryon in the 1940's, supported the genetic basis of behavior. Tryon studied rats and their ability to complete a maze. He gro...

We define the Rook Jumping Maze, provide historical perspective, and describe a generation method for such mazes. When applying stochastic local search algorithms to maze design, most creative effort concerns the definition of an objective function that rates maze quality. We define and discuss several maze features to consider in such a function definition. Finally, we share our preferred desi...

The Barnes maze is one of the main behavioral tasks used to study spatial learning and memory. The Barnes maze is a task conducted on "dry land" in which animals try to escape from a brightly lit exposed circular open arena to a small dark escape box located under one of several holes at the periphery of the arena. In comparison with another classical spatial learning and memory task, the Morri...

In the present study, we used a dry maze task to assess the spatial learning ability of C57BL/6N and BALB/cA mice besides the water maze task. In Experiment 1, the performance of C57BL/6N and BALB/cA mice in the water maze task and dry maze task were investigated. In the former task, the mice had to learn the position of a hidden platform submerged below the water surface and they had to learn ...

*Correspondence: Thomas Eltz, Department of Animal Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity, Ruhr University Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, NDEF 05/788, 44780 Bochum, Germany e-mail: thomas.eltz@ ruhr-uni-bochum.de Bees make use of plant substrates in more ways than any other group of insects, which is probably linked to their diversification and ecological success. The highly diverse Megachilidae us...