Animal Behavior and Cognition

eLife Assessment

This important study uses long-term behavioural observations to understand the factors that influence female-on-female aggression in gorilla social groups. The evidence supporting the claims is convincing, as it includes novel methods of assessing aggression and considers other potential factors. The work will be of interest to broad biologists working on the social interactions of animals.

eLife Assessment

This important study presents a new framework (ASBAR) that combines open-source toolboxes for pose estimation and behavior recognition to automate the process of categorizing behaviors in wild apes from video data. The authors present compelling evidence that this pipeline can categorize simple wild ape behaviors from out-of-context video at a similar level of accuracy as previous models, while simultaneously vastly reducing the size of the model. The study's results should be of particular interest to primatologists and other behavioral biologists working with natural populations.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental study demonstrates how a left-right bias in the relationship between numerical magnitude and space depends on brain lateralization. The evidence is compelling and will be of interest to researchers studying numerical cognition, brain lateralization, and cognitive brain development more broadly.

eLife Assessment

The open-source software Chromas tracks and analyses cephalopod chromatophore dynamics. The software features a user-friendly interface alongside detailed instructions for its application, with compelling exemplary applications to two widely divergent cephalopod species, a squid and a cuttlefish, over time periods large enough to encompass new chromatophore development among existing ones. It demonstrates accurate tracking of the position and identity of each chromatophore. The software and methods outlined therein will become an important tool for scientists tracking dynamic signaling in animals.

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 glia of the blood brain barrier to regulate sleep by modulating Allatostatin A signaling. The evidence is compelling and elegantly performed using the ample Drosophila genetic toolbox, making this work appealing for a broad group of neuroscience researchers interested in sleep and gut-brain interactions.

eLife Assessment

This important study investigates how hummingbird hawkmoths integrate stimuli from across their visual field to guide flight behavior. Cue conflict experiments provide solid evidence for an integration hierarchy within the visual field: hawkmoths prioritize the avoidance of dorsal visual stimuli, potentially to avoid crashing into foliage, while they use ventrolateral optic flow to guide flight control. These findings will be of broad interest to enthusiasts of visual neuroscience and flight behavior.

eLife Assessment

This important work by Diallo et al. substantially advances our understanding of the chemosensory system of a non-hymenopteran eusocial insect by identifying the first olfactory receptor for the trail pheromone in termites. The evidence supporting the conclusions that the receptor PsimOR14 is very narrowly tuned for the pheromone neocembrene is compelling. The work will be of broad interest to entomologists, chemical ecologists, neuroscientists, and molecular biologists.

eLife Assessment

This study provides an important 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 authors have included robust behavior combined with multiple observational and perturbation techniques. The data provided are convincing of the relevance of task-related activity in these two subregions during learning.

eLife Assessment

This study provides important findings on the neural circuits underlying dishabituation of the olfactory avoidance response in Drosophila. The data as presented provide solid evidence that the dishabituation involves distinct pathways from habituation. They show that reward-activated dopaminergic neurons provide input for within-modal dishabituation, while punishment-activated dopaminergic neurons provide input for cross-modal dishabituation. The work will interest neuroscientists, particularly behavioral neuroscientists working on habituation, neural circuits, and the dopaminergic system.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study provides a novel framework for leveraging longitudinal field observations to examine the effects of aging on stone tool use behaviour in wild chimpanzees. The methods and results are robust providing solid evidence of the effects of old age on nut cracking behaviour at this field site. Despite the low sample size of five individuals, this study is of broad interest to ethologists, primatologists, archaeologists, and psychologists.