Animal Behavior and Cognition

eLife Assessment

This useful study develops an individual-based model to investigate the evolution of division of labor in vertebrates, comparing the contributions of group augmentation and kin selection. The model incorporates several biologically relevant features, including age-dependent task switching and separate manipulation of relatedness and group-size benefits. However, the evidence remains incomplete to support the authors' central claim that group augmentation is the primary driver of vertebrate division of labor. Key modelling assumptions, such as limited opportunities for task synergy, the structure of helper and floater dynamics, and the relatively narrow parameter space explored, continue to restrict the potential for kin selection to produce division of labor, thereby limiting the generality of the conclusions.

eLife Assessment

This study presents an important finding that ant nest structure and digging behavior depend on ant age demographics for a ground-dwelling ant species (Camponotus fellah). By asking whether ants employ age-polyethism in excavation, the authors address a long-standing question about how individuals in collectives determine the overall state of the task they must perform. The experimental evidence that the age of the ants and the group composition affect the digging of tunnels is convincing, and their model is able to replicate the colony's excavation dynamics qualitatively, results that may prove to be a key consideration for interpreting results from other studies in the field of social insect behavior.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental study presents experimental evidence on how geomagnetic and visual cues are integrated in a nocturnally migrating insect. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling. The work will be of broad interest to researchers studying animal migration and navigation.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript makes a valuable contribution to understanding learning in multidimensional environments with spurious associations, which is critical for understanding learning in the real world. The evidence is based on model simulations and a preregistered human behavioral study, but remains incomplete because of inconclusive empirical results and insufficiencies in the modeling. Moreover, there are open questions about the nature and extent to which the behavioral task induced semantic congruency.

eLife Assessment

This study seeks to expand the understanding of insulin and glucose responses in the brain, specifically by implicating a family of protein kinases responsive to insulin. The significance of the study to the field is valuable, given this study is very emblematic of the new field of interoception (Brain-Body physiology). The evidence supporting the conclusions about brain glucose utilization is convincing and is relevant to many age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer's disorder.

eLife Assessment

This important study presents JABS, an open-source platform that integrates hardware and user-friendly software for standardized mouse behavioral phenotyping. The work has practical implications for improving reproducibility and accessibility in behavioral neuroscience, especially for linking behavior to genetics across diverse mouse strains. The strength of evidence is convincing, with comprehensive validation of the platform's components and enthusiastic reviewer support.

eLife Assessment

This study presents vassi, a Python package that streamlines the preparation of training data for machine-learning-based classification of social behaviors in animal groups. This package is a valuable resource for researchers with computational expertise, implementing a framework for the detection of directed social interactions within a group and an interactive tool for reviewing and correcting behavior detections. However, the strength of evidence that the method is widely applicable remains incomplete, performance on benchmark dyadic datasets is comparable to existing approaches, and performance scores on collective behavioral datasets are low. While the package can analyze behavior in large groups of animals, it only outputs dyadic interactions within these groups and does not account for behaviors where more than two animals may be interacting.

eLife Assessment

These valuable studies explore the consequences of exposure to the toxin hydrogen sulfide (H2S) on the behavior and physiology of C. elegans. The work finds that behavioral changes evoked by H2S exposure are modulated by several regulatory pathways known to influence chemosensory-evoked locomotor behavior, but there is incomplete data to support the authors' claim of comprehensive mechanistic insight into the consequences of H2S exposure. Nevertheless, the findings may be informative for those studying organismal stress responses and the effects of mitochondrial ROS on behavior and physiology.

eLife Assessment

This study introduces Megabouts, a transformer-based classifier for larval zebrafish movement bouts. This useful tool is thoughtfully implemented and has clear potential to unify analyses across labs. However, the evidence supporting its robustness is incomplete. How the method generalizes across datasets, how sensitive it is to noise, and the specific sources of misclassification are unclear. The method would also be strengthened by providing options for users to fine-tune the clusters under different experimental conditions, which would further enhance reliability and flexibility.

eLife Assessment

This important work develops the C. elegans as a model organism for studying effort-based discounting by asking the worms to choose between patches of easy and hard to digest bacteria. The authors provide convincing evidence that the nematodes are effort discounting. They also provide solid evidence of involvement of dopamine in the food preference and that the finding is not restricted to lab-acclimated strains.