Animal Behavior and Cognition

Olfactory basis for essential amino acid perception during foraging in Caenorhabditis elegans

1. Ritika Siddiqui
2. Nikita Mehta
3. Gopika Ranjith
4. Marie-Anne Felix
5. Changchun Chen
6. Varsha Singh

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This is an important study, supported by solid data, that suggests a model for diet selection in C. elegans. The significance is that while C. elegans has long been known to be attracted to bacterial volatiles, what specific bacterial volatiles may signify to C. elegans is largely unknown. This study also provides evidence for a possible odorant/GPCR pairing.

Reviewed by eLife

Endogenous Precision of the Number Sense

1. Arthur Prat-Carrabin
2. Michael Woodford

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This research investigates the precision of numerosity perception in two different tasks and concludes that human performance aligns with an efficient coding model optimized for current environmental statistics and task goals. The findings may have important implications for our understanding of numerosity perception as well as the ongoing debate on different efficient coding models. However, the evidence presented in the paper to support the conclusion is still incomplete and could be strengthened by further modeling analysis or experimental data that can address potential confounds.

Reviewed by eLife

Glia-mediated gut-brain cytokine signaling couples sleep to intestinal inflammation

1. Alina Malita
2. Olga Kubrak
3. Xiaokang Chen
4. Takashi Koyama
5. Elizabeth C Connolly
6. Nadja Ahrentløv
7. Ditte S Andersen
8. Michael J Texada
9. Kenneth V Halberg
10. Kim Rewitz

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important work by Malita et al. describes a mechanism by which an intestinal infection causes an increase in daytime sleep through signaling from the gut to the blood-brain barrier. Their findings suggest that cytokines upd3 and upd2 produced by the intestine following infection act on the glia of the blood-brain barrier to regulate sleep by modulating Allatostatin A signaling. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid. Further verification of certain critical tools, and addressing a few discrepancies from data previously published, would improve this work.

Reviewed by eLife

WNKs regulate mouse behavior and alter central nervous system glucose uptake and insulin signaling

1. Ankita B Jaykumar
2. Derk Binns
3. Clinton A Taylor
4. Anthony Anselmo
5. Shari G Birnbaum
6. Kimberly M Huber
7. Melanie H Cobb

• Curated by eLife

  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. The evidence supporting the conclusions about brain glucose utilization is convincing, although there are several aspects that could benefit from additional validation to strengthen the claims.

Reviewed by eLife

DeePosit: an AI-based tool for detecting mouse urine and fecal depositions from thermal video clips of behavioral experiments

1. David Peles
2. Shai Netser
3. Natalie Ray
4. Shlomo Wagner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript presents a valuable machine-learning-based approach to the automated detection of urine and fecal deposits by rodents, key ethological behaviors that have traditionally been very poorly studied. The strength of evidence for their claim, however, that the method provides "easy, efficient, and unbiased spatiotemporal analysis of scent marking during behavioral experiments" is incomplete. In particular, there were concerns about the generalizability of the approach, the relatively limited detection capabilities of the method, and a lack of rationale for specific design choices. This manuscript could be of interest to researchers in animal behavior, neuroscience, and automated animal tracking.

Reviewed by eLife

Developmental stage shapes the realized energy landscape for a flight specialist

1. Elham Nourani
2. Louise Faure
3. Hester Brønnvik
4. Martina Scacco
5. Enrico Bassi
6. Wolfgang Fiedler
7. Martin U Grüebler
8. Julia S Hatzl
9. David Jenny
10. Andrea Roverselli
11. Petra Sumasgutner
12. Matthias Tschumi
13. Martin Wikelski
14. Kamran Safi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study substantially advances our understanding of energy landscapes and their link to animal ontogeny. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling, with high-throughput telemetry data and advanced track segmentation methods used to develop and map energy landscapes. The work will be of broad interest to animal ecologists.

Reviewed by eLife

Why the brown ghost chirps at night

1. Livio Oboti
2. Federico Pedraja
3. Marie Ritter
4. Marlena Lohse
5. Lennart Klette
6. Rüdiger Krahe

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study addresses a question in sensory ethology and active sensing in particular. It links the production of a specific signal - electrosensory chirps - to various contexts and conditions to argue that the main function is to enhance conspecific localization rather than communication as previously believed. The study provides a lot of valuable data, but the methods section is incomplete making it difficult to evaluate the claims.

Reviewed by eLife

Acquisition of auditory discrimination mediated by different processes through two distinct circuits linked to the lateral striatum

1. Susumu Setogawa
2. Takashi Okauchi
3. Di Hu
4. Yasuhiro Wada
5. Keigo Hikishima
6. Hirotaka Onoe
7. Kayo Nishizawa
8. Nobuyuki Sakayori
9. Hiroyuki Miyawaki
10. Takuma Kitanishi
11. Kenji Mizuseki
12. Yilong Cui
13. Kazuto Kobayashi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study provides a potentially valuable understanding of the contribution of different striatal subregions, the anterior Dorsal Lateral Striatum (aDLS) and the posterior Ventrolateral Striatum (pVLS), to auditory discrimination learning. The combined methods used to probe this are compelling, yet the data presented are incomplete to support the conclusions. There is insufficient data visualization of learning vs. performance, and missing details about timing of manipulations and microPET imaging.

Reviewed by eLife

Individual recognition in a jumping spider (Phidippus regius)

1. Christoph D Dahl
2. Yaling Cheng

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study provides a valuable examination of the social recognition abilities of a jumping spider, Phippidus regius. Behavioral essays yielded solid evidence that these spiders discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals on the basis of visual cues, but the experimental support for individual recognition and long-term memory is incomplete.

Reviewed by eLife

Scale-sensitive Mouse Facial Expression Pipeline using a Surrogate Calibration Task

1. Andre Telfer
2. Oliver van Kaick
3. Alfonso Abizaid

Reviewed by PREreview