Animal Behavior and Cognition

Automatically tracking feeding behavior in populations of foraging C. elegans

1. Elsa Bonnard
2. Jun Liu
3. Nicolina Zjacic
4. Luis Alvarez
5. Monika Scholz

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript reports a new method for high-throughput analysis of C. elegans feeding behaviour that overcomes shortcomings of existing methods. It is a useful technique that will be interesting for scientists studying feeding dynamics in worms.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Multiple preferred escape trajectories are explained by a geometric model incorporating prey’s turn and predator attack endpoint

1. Yuuki Kawabata
2. Hideyuki Akada
3. Ken-ichiro Shimatani
4. Gregory Naoki Nishihara
5. Hibiki Kimura
6. Nozomi Nishiumi
7. Paolo Domenici

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This article may be of interest to researchers working on predator-prey interactions in the fields of biomechanics and neurosensory biology. It presents a mathematical model that outputs possible escape trajectories given parameters relevant to the predator-prey system of interest. The premise of the modeling is attractive, as it includes the time required for prey to turn, but the methods as presently reported raise questions about the validity of some of the conclusions.

  (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 #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Role of immigrant males and muzzle contacts in the uptake of a novel food by wild vervet monkeys

1. Pooja Dongre
2. Gaëlle Lanté
3. Mathieu Cantat
4. Charlotte Canteloup
5. Erica van de Waal

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Dongre et al. build on previous social learning research on wild vervet monkeys to investigate the role of a particular social behaviour, muzzle-muzzle contact, in aiding the acceptance of a novel food and provide interesting observations on the potential for male monkeys immigrating from one social group to another in spreading this novel behaviour. With a more robust and transparent analysis, this manuscript has the potential to provide significant insights into innovation and social learning in animals.

  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.

Reviewed by eLife

Both prey and predator features predict the individual predation risk and survival of schooling prey

1. Jolle Wolter Jolles
2. Matthew MG Sosna
3. Geoffrey PF Mazué
4. Colin R Twomey
5. Joseph Bak-Coleman
6. Daniel I Rubenstein
7. Iain D Couzin

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This study, which will be of interest to behavioral ecologists, uses highly quantitative video tracking approaches to understand the predictors of predators' success in attacking schooling fish and will be of interest to behavioral, evolutionary, and movement ecologists. While some of the results seem unsurprising (e.g., that predators tend to successfully capture prey that are closer to them), the manuscript as a whole highlights the importance of tracking the perspective of the predator as well as of the prey, and shows that animals that are central to a group may sometimes be the most vulnerable. Although the experiments and data analyses are commendable, the manuscript would benefit from more careful discussion of its overall implications for the evolution of collective behavior, including potential limits of the experimental design.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

The evolution and biological correlates of hand preferences in anthropoid primates

1. Kai R Caspar
2. Fabian Pallasdies
3. Larissa Mader
4. Heitor Sartorelli
5. Sabine Begall

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper combines new and previously generated data on hand preference to show that hand preference strength, but not direction, is predicted by ecology and phylogeny across primates. By drawing on the most expansive data set to date on experimentally determined hand preference, it calls existing hypotheses on the evolution of hand preference into question and shows that the strength of lateralization in humans is uniquely extreme. Its results are of interest to evolutionary anthropologists, primatologists, and evolutionary morphologists. However, concerns about intraspecific variation and the accuracy of handedness estimates for poorly sampled species are incompletely addressed by the manuscript in its current form.

  (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 #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Integration of visual and antennal mechanosensory feedback during head stabilization in hawkmoths

1. Payel Chatterjee
2. Agnish Dev Prusty
3. Umesh Mohan
4. Sanjay P Sane

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper will be of interest to neuroscientists who study navigation and multisensory integration. In it, the authors use several manipulations to convincingly show that hawkmoths use mechanosensory feedback from their antennae to stabilize their head when their body rotates quickly or when they have little visual input. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that control of head angle in insects that lack halteres results from a multimodal feedback loop that integrates visual and antennal mechanosensory feedback. This advances our understanding of how such stabilizing reflexes work beyond Dipteran flies, where much prior work has focused.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Adaptation of Drosophila larva foraging in response to changes in food resources

1. Marina E Wosniack
2. Dylan Festa
3. Nan Hu
4. Julijana Gjorgjieva
5. Jimena Berni

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper contributes to the growing body of literature that investigates foraging in complex landscapes. It is therefore of interest to neuroscientists and ecologists. The paper effectively combines behavioral experiments with phenomenological modeling to investigate which navigational strategies are responsive to the type and distribution of food patches. The main experimental results pertaining to food strategy are well supported, with secondary results limited by the low sample sizes.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Conditional and unconditional components of aversively motivated freezing, flight and darting in mice

1. Jeremy M Trott
2. Ann N Hoffman
3. Irina Zhuravka
4. Michael S Fanselow

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper will be of interest to neuroscientists, learning theorists and clinicians concerned with factors influencing threat-related response selection relevant to fear vs. panic. The manuscript describes a group of well designed experiments that investigate whether flight-like behaviors reported by other investigators require associative learning in order to occur. The authors demonstrate that non-associative influences can produce strong flight behaviors, but the dataset presented does not eliminate the possibility that associative influences can drive these responses, as well.

  (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 #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Fat body phospholipid state dictates hunger-driven feeding behavior

1. Kevin P Kelly
2. Mroj Alassaf
3. Camille E Sullivan
4. Ava E Brent
5. Zachary H Goldberg
6. Michelle E Poling
7. Julien Dubrulle
8. Akhila Rajan

Reviewed by Review Commons

Collective dynamics support group drumming, reduce variability, and stabilize tempo drift

1. Dobromir Dotov
2. Lana Delasanta
3. Daniel J Cameron
4. Edward W Large
5. Laurel Trainor

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The paper will be of great interest to scientists looking for new approaches to understanding group behavior, especially within the fields of human cognition, neurosciences, and musicology. Taking joint drumming as a model of collective dynamics, and combining several quantitative methods, the authors characterize how human behavior changes, at the individual- and group-level, as a function of group numerosity. An important take home message of this work is that not everything we know from studies involving dyads should be necessarily generalized to larger groups.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife