‘Anxiety’ in laboratory rodents: a brief review of some recent behavioural developments
It is clearly difficult to determine which of the multitude of behavioural and physiological indices provides the most reliable indicator of ‘stress’ in any particular animal. Although ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ have obvious survival value in feral animals, the induction of intense or chronic states of fearfulness are likely to account for much of the ‘stress’ […]
Metabolic rate and body size are linked with perception of temporal information
Body size and metabolic rate both fundamentally constrain how species interact with their environment, and hence ultimately affect their niche. While many mechanisms leading to these constraints have been explored, their effects on the resolution at which temporal information is perceived have been largely overlooked. The visual system acts as a gateway to the dynamic […]
Prey behavioural reaction norms: response to threat predicts susceptibility to predation
Behavioural syndromes (i.e. population-level behavioural correlations) arise when individuals, on average, maintain the same behavioural expression across different ecological contexts. Population-level syndromes can appear maladaptive, such as when prey remain active across the absence and presence of a sit-and-wait predator. Yet in nature, individuals often vary in syndrome adherence, exhibiting individual-level differences in behavioural plasticity. […]