To Bees or Not to Bees: Greater Honeyguides Sometimes Guide Humans to Animals Other Than Bees, but Likely Not as Punishment

Reciprocal signaling in honeyguide-human mutualism

Honeyguide birds recognize human honey-hunters calls and help them find wild bees’ nests.

(PDF) Hunters and Guides: Multispecies Encounters between Humans, Honeyguide Birds and Honeybees

PDF | This paper discusses the relationship between humans and honeyguide birds (Indicator indicator) in the Adamaoua Region of Cameroon. Throughout... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

The understanding that even bees have feelings is changing our view of consciousness | New Scientist

From jays that seem to say "sorry" to insects that play, signs of emotional inner life across the animal kingdom are giving us new perspectives on what consciousness is, and how we might pin it down

Heterospecific social behavior in primates: insights into the evolutionary roots of pet-keeping

Primate interspecific interactions with both other primates and non-primate species range from predator–prey dynamics to affiliative behaviors such as grooming, play, and carrying. While many primates participate in interspecific associations or commensal relationships, to our knowledge interspecific social interactions have never been systematically synthesized. Here, we present the first comprehensive review of such interactions, compiling 427 cases from the literature, media sources, and a global survey of primatologists. These involved 88 primate species and 127 non-primate species (including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, malacostracans, and insects) across wild (n = 311) and captive (n = 111) contexts. The most frequent interactions occurred within or between primate families (e.g., Cercopithecidae–Cercopithecidae, Cebidae–Atelidae), though affiliative behaviors were also directed toward distantly related taxa such as dogs and birds. Play (n = 139) and grooming (n = 136) were most common. Juveniles and infants predominantly engaged in play, while adult females were more likely to groom. Adult males were less affiliative overall. Contrary to expectations, affiliative behaviors were not more often directed toward immature than adult heterospecifics. Primates were the initiators in most interactions. These findings offer new insights into the diversity and contexts of heterospecific sociality in primates and suggest that some behavioral tendencies relevant to later forms of human–animal companionship – such as caregiving, tolerance, and exploratory play – may be more widespread among primates than previously recognized.

Curiosity Traps

On reverse honeypots, rewarding close attention, and finding your people

Honeybee Democracy

How honeybees make collective decisions—and what we can learn from this amazing democratic process

Human–Animal Interaction and Human Prosociality: A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental and Correlational Studies

Pet ownership and interactions with animals confer various physiological and psychological benefits to humans. Although interactions with animals are commonplace, there is no consensus in the liter...

Richard McElreath Director Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture [link] Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology [link]

The evolution of cultural adaptations: Fijian food taboos protect against dangerous marine toxins

The application of evolutionary theory to understanding the origins of our species' capacities for social learning has generated key insights into cultural evolution. By focusing on how our psychology has evolved to adaptively extract beliefs and practices by observing others, theorists have hypothesized how social learning can, over generations, give rise to culturally evolved adaptations. While much field research documents the subtle ways in which culturally transmitted beliefs and practices adapt people to their local environments, and much experimental work reveals the predicted patterns of social learning, little research connects real-world adaptive cultural traits to the patterns of transmission predicted by these theories. Addressing this gap, we show how food taboos for pregnant and lactating women in Fiji selectively target the most toxic marine species, effectively reducing a woman's chances of fish poisoning by 30 per cent during pregnancy and 60 per cent during breastfeeding. We further analyse how these taboos are transmitted, showing support for cultural evolutionary models that combine familial transmission with selective learning from locally prestigious individuals. In addition, we explore how particular aspects of human cognitive processes increase the frequency of some non-adaptive taboos. This case demonstrates how evolutionary theory can be deployed to explain both adaptive and non-adaptive behavioural patterns.

Social Insects : Ecology and Behavioural Biology

1 online resource; Here is a guide to the ecology of social insects. It is intended for general ecologists and entomologists as well as for undergraduates and those about to start research on social insects; even the experienced investigator may find the comparison between different groups of social insects illuminating. Most technical terms are translated into common language as far as can be done without loss of accuracy but scientific names are unavoidable. Readers will become familiar with the name even though they cannot visualize the animal and could reflect that only a very few of the total species have been studied so far! References too are essential and with these it should be possible to travel more deeply into the vast research literature, still increasing monthly. When I have cited an author in another author's paper, this implies that I have not read the original and the second author must take responsi bility for accuracy! Many hands and heads have helped to make this book. I thank all my colleagues past and present for their enduring though critical support, and I thank with special pleasure: E.]. M. Evesham who fashioned the diagrams;]. Free, D.J. Stradling and]. P.E.C. Darlington who supplied photographs; D.Y. Brian and R.A. Weller who were meticulous on the linguistic side; and G. Frith and R.M. Jones who collated the references. List of plates 1. Fungus combs of Acromyrmex octospinosus and Macrotermes michaelseni. 13 2. Mouthparts of larval Myrmica; 1 Introduction -- 2 Food -- 2.1 Termites as decomposers -- 2.2 Wasps and ants as predators -- 2.3 Sugars as fuel save prey -- 2.4 Seed eaters -- 2.5 Leaf eaters -- 2.6 Pollen eaters -- 3 Foraging by individuals -- 3.1 Foraging strategy -- 3.2 Worker variability -- 4 Foraging in groups -- 4.1 Communication about food -- 4.2 Group slave-raiding -- 4.3 Tunnels and tracks -- 4.4 Nomadic foraging -- 5 Cavity nests and soil mounds -- 5.1 Cavities and burrows -- 5.2 Soil mounds -- 6 Nests of fibre, silk and wax -- 6.1 Mounds of vegetation and tree nests -- 6.2 Combs of cells -- 7 Microclimate -- 7.1 Environmental regulation -- 7.2 Metabolic regulation -- 8 Defence -- 8.1 Painful and paralysing injections -- 8.2 Toxic smears and repellants -- 9 Food processing -- 9.1 Mastication, extraction and regurgitation -- 9.2 Yolk food supplements -- 9.3 Head food glands -- 10 Early population growth -- 10.1 Food distribution -- 10.2 Colony foundation -- 10.3 The growth spurt -- 11 Maturation -- 11.1 Simple models of reproduction -- 11.2 Social control over caste -- 11.3 Males in social Hymenoptera -- 11.4 Maturation in general -- 12 Reproduction -- 12.1 Caste morphogenesis -- 12.2 Copulation and dispersal -- 12.3 Production -- 12.4 Summary -- 13 Evolution of insect societies -- 13.1 Theories of individual selection -- 13.2 Models of these theories -- 13.3 Group selection -- 13.4 Conclusions -- 14 Colonies -- 14.1 The colony barrier -- 14.2 Queen number and species ecology -- 14.3 Queen interaction and queen relatedness -- 15 Comparative ecology of congeneric species -- 15.1 Ant and termite races -- 15.2 Desert ants and termites -- 15.3 Ants and termites in grassland -- 15.4 Forest ants and termites -- 15.5 Wasps and bumblebees -- 15.6 Advanced bees -- 16 Communities -- 16.1 Temperate zone communities in grass and woodland -- 16.2 Desert communities -- 16.3 Tropical rain forest -- 16.4 Conclusions -- 17 Two themes -- 17.1 Plant mutualism -- 17.2 Social organization -- References -- Author index

Misreading as Foraging: How Systems Get Used for Things They Weren't Made For - Astral's Blog

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Check out Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? - Hailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition--in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos--to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we've underestimated their abilities for too long. Did you know that octopuses use coconut shells as tools, that elephants classify humans by gender and language, and that there is a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame? Fascinating, entertaining, and deeply informed, de Waal's landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal--and human--intelligence. by Dr Frans de Waal on Bookshop.org US!

Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence

Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.

Pheromone

A pheromone is a chemical that is secreted or excreted by an organism, which triggers a social response in members of the same species. There are alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect behavior or physiology. Pheromones are used by many organisms, from basic unicellular prokaryotes to complex multicellular eukaryotes. Their use among insects has been particularly well documented. In addition, some vertebrates, plants and ciliates communicate by using pheromones. The ecological functions and evolution of pheromones are a major topic of research in the field of chemical ecology.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosperHumans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.