#behavioral ecology

[grison-in-space]

golly, I am being wordy today.

Via Metafilter:

Someone on MeFi tagged me in and asked me to chime in in my capacity as a rodent person, so here were my thoughts and observations:

First thought, looking at that video: that is no house mouse. Not only is the head wrong--too narrow at the back, eyes are a bit big--but that very clear countershading is not something you generally see on wild house mice. So what kind of mouse is it? If this was in the US, I would assume it was a Peromyscus (deer mouse) species, which often gleefully invade our homes, but do they have Peromyscus in Wales? In North America, this is relevant because deer mouse species often have very elaborated burrowing and pair bonding systems, and this looks like nesting behavior off the top of my head. What sort of mouse is this? The Woodland UK Trust suggests that this is probably a wood (or field) mouse: Apodemus sylvaticus. (There are glorious big photos there which can help you see what I mean.) Okay, I don't know that much about Apodemus spp. behavior, so what do we know about their nesting behavior? Well, I chased a couple of false leads, then circled back to find out what is notable about wood mice, which is that they are known to not only navigate by the use of landmarks, but to organize their environments to place small objects around their environments in order to make navigation and orienting themselves across their large territories more effectively! So this mouse is probably irritably putting things back in place as an aid to its own memory of where everything is and where it can most effectively pilfer snacks, nest locations, or other useful mouse items within its environment. That is, the mouse wants a tidy shed for exactly the same reasons a human might want a tidy shed: so it can find things it's looking for when it wants to! Wood mice, by the way, are human commensals and quite common in Europe and the British Isles, so this is in no way a refutation of the idea that this behavior might have influenced human folklore and ideas about house spirits or similar. Certainly wood mice, like any mouse, are unlikely to turn up a bowl of milk if there's one put out for it--although neither are house cats, which would certainly prey on them.

rather delighted, so I'm sharing this more widely over here.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Barred from her lab by pandemic restrictions, behavioral ecologist Daniela Rößler caught local jumping spiders and kept them in clear plastic boxes on her windowsill, planning to test their reactions to 3-D-printed models of predatory spiders. When she came home from dinner one night, though, she noticed something strange. “They were all hanging from the lids of their boxes,” says Rößler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She had never seen jumping spiders suspended motionless on silk lines like this before. “I had no idea what happened,” Rößler says. “I thought they were dead.”

It turns out the jumping spiders were simply asleep—and that Rößler had discovered an alternate sleeping habit of the species Evarcha arcuata, which had been known to build silk sleeping dens in curled-up dead leaves. But the real surprise came when she decided to spy on them all night. She bought a cheap night-vision camera, duct-taped some magnifying lenses to it (E. arcuata is typically around six millimeters long) and aimed it at a sleeping female spider. What Rößler saw on the recording astonished her.

Mostly the spider just hung there. But then her legs started to twitch, and her abdomen and even her silk-producing spinnerets did so as well. Sometimes her legs curled in toward her sternum. With every spider Rößler recorded, these odd movements only appeared during distinct bouts that lasted a little more than a minute and occurred periodically throughout the night. “They were just uncontrollably twitching in a way that really looked a lot like when dogs or cats dream and have their little REM phases,” she says.

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep involves a state of partial or near-total muscle paralysis paired with an active, awakelike brain state, which is why it is sometimes called “paradoxical sleep.” In humans, this state has been strongly linked with dreaming. Rößler and her colleagues wondered if the twitching spiders could be experiencing something like an REM phase of sleep and possibly even having dreams. “We were like, ‘Okay, that would be insane,’” she says. Then she thought, “Let’s figure it out,” and immediately changed her research plans for the spiders.

There is abundant evidence for REM sleep or an analogous state in many mammals and birds. Scientists have also found something similar in two reptile species and hints of a state like it in zebra fish. Both octopuses and cuttlefish appear to have an REM phase, complete with eye movements, arm twitches, and rapid skin color and texture changes that resemble displays they perform when awake. Beyond those animals, there are glimmers but not much evidence of REM sleep in invertebrates, including insects and arachnids.

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if [jumping spiders] have dreams,” says behavioral ecologist Lisa Taylor, who studies the spiders at the University of Florida and was not involved in the new research. “They live in such a rich sensory world, and we know they have amazing cognitive capabilities and memory.”

The jumping spiders offered a unique opportunity to expand the realm of dreaming animals, in part because of particular aspects of their ocular anatomy. Though most spiders cannot move their eyes even while awake, jumping spiders have long tubes that shift their retinas around behind their large principal eyes. What’s more, for the first several days of life, the spiders’ exoskeleton is translucent, so those eye tubes are visible inside their head.

When Rößler recorded 34 sleeping spiderlings, she found that their twitches were accompanied by unmistakable eye-tube movements that did not happen during other phases of sleep. “It’s beautiful. I mean, it’s crazy. It immediately makes a sleep researcher think about rapid eye movement sleep,” says entomologist Barrett Klein, who researches bee sleep at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and was not directly involved in Rößler’s work. “And to have the first indication that you could study such a thing or that it’s even relevant in arthropods is thrilling to me.”

But it is too soon to say for sure that the spiders are experiencing something akin to REM sleep in humans, Klein cautions. The researchers first need to confirm the spiders are actually asleep during this phase by showing that they are less responsive to their environment, he says.

Rößler and her “dream team” of co-authors have already started those tests. And she points out that the leg curling is a particularly striking aspect of the spiders’ REM-like phase because that pose is typically only seen in dead spiders. Spiders use hydraulic pressure maintained by muscles to keep their legs extended, and the curling could result from the muscle paralysis that typifies REM sleep. The team’s initial findings were published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

A study that just came out demonstrates that outdoor cats are known to prey on over two thousands species of wild animal, from mammals to birds to insects. That includes 347 species that are endangered, threatened or otherwise of concern, and they've been a key factor of the permanent extinction of over 60 species. And while cats may not always bring home what they catch, chances are if your cat is allowed to roam unsupervised outside, they're killing your local wildlife.

Why is this so important? Worldwide, wild animal populations have decreased in number by 69% in the past fifty years; that means that in my lifetime (born in 1978), the sheer number of wild animals in the world has been decreased by over half. Even "common" wild species are less numerous than before. While habitat population is the single biggest cause of species endangerment and extinction overall, outdoor and indoor/outdoor cats are a significant cause as well. In fact, they are the single biggest cause of human-caused mortality in wild birds.

Most importantly, it's very, very simple to fix this problem: keep your cats indoors, and spay and neuter them. If your cat is bored, they need more enrichment, and there are plenty of ways to make your home more exciting for them, from bringing home cardboard boxes for them to explore, to playing with them more often. If you want your cat to get some outdoor enrichment, leash train them (yes, it can be done!) If you have the space and resources, build them a catio where they can be safe from outdoor dangers like predators and cars, while also keeping local wildlife safe from them.

If you just give into their whining and pawing at the door, then they know that that's what they have to do to get their way; I know it's a tough transition, but it's worth it in the end for everyone involved. Cats are domesticated, which means they are not native anywhere in the world; there are exactly zero ecosystems in which they belong, save for the safety of your home. It is your responsibility to give them an enriching environment without taking the shortcut of letting them go wreak havoc outside.

[kobbers]

Rathalaugust 2023 (catchup) day 21: Fulgur Anjanath

I combined my love of Anjanath chilling with its sail up with the apparent lore that the babies are fully feathered (before they lose much of it as adults).

[wildlifetracker]

Sloths are adapted to spend all day in trees. They are nocturnal and will sleep up to 20 hours a day. However, they will come to the forest floor to go to the bathroom, which they do only approximately once a week. Visitors at the zoo always tell me they want one as a pet, but I promise you that's not a good idea. Aside from the negative impacts of the wildlife trade, these guys are also very stinky.

[ashroomancer]

Hey puppy girls, find you a bird girl! Ravens and wolves have been known to commonly not just commingle but also hunt together. The ravens will spot the prey and tell the wolves where it is and help them track it and in return the ravens get some food. So get you a goth bird girl to find you shines and point out prey girls for you today!

[groenendaze]

[sandhya17]

Facts About Sloth Bear

[prose2passion]

Researchers show that great bustards in Spain prefer to eat two plant species with compounds active in vitro against protozoa, nematodes, and fungi: corn poppies and purple viper’s bugloss. Males, who spend much time and energy on sexual displays during the mating season, have a stronger preference for these plants than females, and more so during the mating season than at other times of the year. The authors thus consider great bustards as prime candidates for non-human animals that self-medicate, but stress that more research is needed to definitively prove this.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Okay, so this is really cool! You have this phenomenon where some plants grow edible appendages to their seeds to entice ants to carry them underground where they can safely sprout. And then you have wasps which lay their eggs on the leaves, stems, and other parts of plants and trigger the growth of galls (swellings) which both feed and protect the wasp larvae until they reach maturity.

The boy who was watching the ants noticed they were taking wasp galls underground, too. Further exploration found that the wasp larvae were unharmed inside the galls; the only thing the ants had eaten were edible appendages similar to those on the seeds they collected. The wasp larvae stayed safe inside the ant nest, feeding on their galls, until it was time to emerge and head back out to the surface.

So it turns out that the edible portions of the galls have the same sorts of fatty acids as the edible parts of the seeds. And those fatty acids are also found in dead insects. Scientists think that the wasps evolved a way to make the galls they created mimic the edible portions of the seeds to get the ants to collect the galls. This isn't the only example of wasps making use of ants as caretakers for their young, but it's a really fascinating example thereof--especially if you consider ants evolved from wasps at least 100 million years ago.

[femmeidiot]

just randomly started thinking about Christianity weirdly influenced my obsession with knowing too much about music artists? Like when I was a kid and I started obsessively reading through album liner notes it was in part because I love lyrics and songwriting information but it was also because I wanted to see if these random pop stars were thanking god in the album notes and i would feel better about listening to their music if they did??? Anyway that’s weird as hell of me but whatever.

[ahhvernin]

It was raining hard, saw a big skunk run across my lawn and across the street.  few seconds later a little skunk is zig zagging across my lawn doing circles, stopped at the street, ran back towards my house, saw me in the window, ran back towards the street, did some more ziggy zaggys, decided to go left along the road but not cross the street, half a minute later it came back to go right, then it came back, sat, did a few more circles in the grass, then went into in the milkweed. Mom came back, they sniffy sniffed and they trotted up the hill. Bye cuties....dont come back I dont want to smell you. K thnx bye. Don’t feel bad little one,  I also have separation anxiety, just dont do the circles and ziggy zaggys again in broad daylight unless you want someone to call animal control on you.

[productsandreviews1]

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[imstronglikeanamazon]

Photoset for ECO 367: Foundations of Behavioral Ecology

[hwanhee]

If I end up TAing during my PhD which I probably will I can like actually teach something in my field this time 🥺