Animal Behavior and Cognition

eLife Assessment

This study provides a valuable examination of the social discrimination abilities of a jumping spider, Phippidus regius, based on visual cues. Behavioral essays yielded solid evidence that these spiders discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals on the basis of visual cues, however the experimental support for individual recognition and long-term memory is incomplete. While the results supply evidence of discrimination, additional experiments would be needed to verify the evidence of individual recognition.

eLife Assessment

This study reveals that female moths use ultrasonic sounds emitted by dehydrated plants to guide their oviposition decisions. It highlights sound as an additional sensory modality in host searching, adding an important piece to the puzzle of how insects and plants interact. Through convincing experimental approaches, the authors provide insights that advance our understanding of plant-insect interactions.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript describes a novel approach for assessing cognitive function in freely moving mice in their home-cage, without human involvement. The authors provide convincing evidence in support of the tasks they developed to capture a variety of complex behaviors and demonstrate the utility of a machine learning approach to expedite the acquisition of task demands. This work is important given its potential utility for other investigators interested in studying mouse 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.