Animal Behavior and Cognition

eLife assessment

This study presents important findings on the hunting strategies and energy intake of a bat in the wild. It combines several methods (biologging, captive experiment, and DNA metabarcoding) to provide convincing evidence for the claims. While relevant for researchers in the broad field of animal ecology, in its the current form, the significance of the results may be hard to appreciate for a general audience.

eLife assessment

This fundamental study substantially advances our understanding of interactions of consecutive memory tasks by identifying responsible molecules and neurons. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is generally solid, although further contextualization of the interferences in memory consolidation and more rigorous measurements of the effects of genetic manipulation would have strengthened the study. The work will be of broad interest to neuroscientists working on learning and memory as well as learning psychologists.

eLife assessment

Why do fish school together? Energetic benefits have long been considered a key factor in motivating fish to swim together and tune their tail beat to exploit the whirling wake generated by conspecifics. This study clearly demonstrates that fish benefit from swimming in a two-dimensional vortical wake by locating their body in the vortical low-pressure zones that passively impart a net thrust force on their oscillating bodies. The behavioral and biofluid mechanical findings will interest comparative biomechanists, movement ecologists, evolutionary biologists, fluid mechanists, and bioinspired roboticists.

eLife assessment

This study is of relevance to the field of collective animal behavior. The proposed crop-cue-based motion-switching rules provide a welcome alternative to other models that assume far more deliberative abilities of ants, and it will be valuable to add this example to the collective motion and collective decision-making literature. There were several major issues that need addressing, including: overly simplistic models, no connection to similar phenomena in motion ecology and statistical mechanics, potential deficiences in the stochastic modeling approach, as well as some confusing terms and curious citations of the literature.

eLife assessment

This paper addresses the long-standing problem of color categorization and the forces that bring it about, which can be potentially interesting to researchers in cognition, visual neuroscience, society, and culture. In particular, the authors show that as a "model organism", a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained with the human-labelled image dataset ImageNet for object recognition can represent color categories. The finding reveals important features of deep neural networks in color processing and can also guide future theoretical and empirical work in high-level color vision.

eLife assessment

This is an important and timely characterization of a diversity of behaviors male and female rats exhibit during the acquisition of Pavlovian fear conditioning in a conditioned suppression procedure. The data are compelling and provide an exhaustive analysis of behavior in a complex associative learning paradigm that blends aversive Pavlovian and appetitive instrumental elements. The generalizability of these findings to other paradigms could be enhanced, however, with the inclusion of tests of cue responses in a neutral environment. These findings are likely to be of interest to those who study fear conditioning and associative learning more broadly in rodents.

Evaluation Summary:

The authors investigate what type and degree of information (either absolute, relative, or a weighted combination of both) is used by bumblebees when retrieving the value of an item. There is recent evidence in humans and birds that suggests that these organisms use a combination of absolute memories and remembering of subjective ranking in these tasks. The authors conclude that bumblebees indeed use remembered ranking, but that they seem not to be able to retain (or at least utilise) absolute property information for very long. The absence of relevant work in invertebrates would make this study a potentially valuable addition to the scientific literature.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper is of interest to organismal biologists and evolutionary scientists who study cognitive and behavioral sex differences including those with interests in the evolution of complex spatial behaviors. Using intensive field monitoring and experimentally induced navigational challenges, the authors examine two different hypotheses for sex differences in spatial ability in three species of poison frog. A rich and complex story emerges, including from the provision of evidence that is consistent with (but not necessarily yet definitively or exclusively in support of) the hypothesis that androgens may inadvertently affect spatial ability.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

eLife assessment

This study demonstrates an important method that drastically improves the precision of ultrasound localization in interacting mice. The authors present convincing evidence of the usefulness of the method for quantifying vocal behavior in various situations and demonstrate an interesting vocal dominance phenomenon between males. This tool will be of great interest to all scientists interested in vocal behavior in small animals.

Evaluation Summary:

This study investigates the potential role of kin selection in driving social behaviours among siblings in wild mountain gorillas. Using an impressive dataset of 14 years for 157 individuals the authors find some evidence for kin recognition in guiding biases for affiliative and aggressive behaviours. However, the results of the current study will be more convincing if a number of major concerns with the analysis can be addressed.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)