How newborns perceive complexity: the nose capabilities Gérard Coureaud, Charlotte Sinding, Thierry Thomas-Danguin To cite this version: Gérard Coureaud, Charlotte Sinding, Thierry Thomas-Danguin. How newborns perceive complexity: the nose capabilities. Behavior 2011. Joint meeting of the animal behavior society & international ethological conference, Jul 2011, Bloomington, Indiana, United States. hal-01000618 HAL Id: hal-01000618 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01000618 Submitted on 6 Jun 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Behavior 2011 ABSTRACTS Joint meeting of the Animal Behavior Society & International Ethological Conference Plenary and Symposium Lectures, Contributed Talks and Posters In alphabetical order by presenting author 230 Contributed Talk: COGNITION AND LEARNING IV (Thursday PM I) THE EVOLUTION OF SUPERSTITION THROUGH OPTIMAL USE OF INCOMPLETE INFORMATION Kevin Abbott, Thomas Sherratt Carleton University, Canada; Email:[email protected] While superstitions seem maladaptive, they may be an inevitable result of adaptive causal learning mechanisms that optimally tradeoff the risks of falsely 'detecting' non-existent causal relationships (superstition) and of failing to detect real relationships. An individual's exploration-exploitation strategy helps manage this tradeoff. On any given trial an individual must decide whether to act so as to maximise its expected fitness based on current information (exploit) or so as to provide the most information about the true nature of the causal relationship (explore). We present a two-armed bandit model that allows us to identify the optimal learning strategy and to determine how various parameters affect the probability that an individual will develop a superstition. We find that superstitions are more likely when the cost of the superstition is low relative to the potential benefits, and when the individual's prior beliefs suggest that the superstition is true. We also find that both the number of learning trials available and the nature of the individual's uncertainty affect the probability of superstition, but that the these effects depend on the individual's prior beliefs. P1 ABS Genesis Award Poster: APPLIED ANIMAL BEHAVIOR 1 (Poster Session A: Weds. eve) DOES CANNIBALISM AID THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLORADO POTATO BEETLES WHEN EXPOSE TO PESTICIDE. Vanessa Acosta United States; Email:[email protected] Many potato agriculturists dwell with the same issue of dealing with the pests that damage their crops. Potato plants tend to have many different pest (host), however it is known that one of the most severe to their production are the Colorado potato beetle (CPB) also known as Leptinotarsa decemlineata. The problem with these pests is that they rapidly become resistant to insecticide and this makes it difficult to control them. Cannibalism can present important nutritional and competitive advantage to the cannibal and in addition it gives greater genetic similarity within conspecifics and selection for the host specificity and resistance to immunity against pathogens. The purpose of this research is to analyze the way CPB uses the egg as a refuge to develop among pesticide; in this case we will be using Imidacloprid. Pesticide resistance will be analyzed throughout development. In cases where a lot of susceptible and resistant mate in low initial frequency, the resistant allele is more resistant because of the use of refuge and this causes the delaying development of resistance. Further information will be available on the poster. 5 Plenary Lecture: (Thursday AM) IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH: WEDDING IMMUNOLOGY TO ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR Shelley Adamo Dalhousie University, Canada; Email:[email protected] Disease kills. Not surprisingly, animals across phyla have evolved mechanisms to protect themselves from invading organisms. Some of these mechanisms, such as certain immune pathways, appear to have been conserved across a half billion years of evolution. Nevertheless, animals remain susceptible to disease. However, susceptibility can vary across species, across individuals within a species, and is often pathogen-specific. Understanding this variability is difficult, in part because immune function is difficult to measure. Moreover, immune systems exist within a web of connections with other physiological systems. These connections can lead to tradeoffs, some of which may be difficult to predict a priori. Such tradeoffs can have far-reaching effects on life history traits such as development rate and reproductive effort. Interactions between immunity and other functions have also been shown to influence the ability of animals to withstand climate change. This presentation 1 | Behavior 2011 will review these issues, frequently using the cricket, Gryllus texensis, to illustrate these themes. The presentation will focus on the relevance of these issues for Animal Behaviourists. 340 Contributed Talk: SOCIAL BEHAVIOR VI (Friday PM I) HAVE YOU LICKED YOUR KIDS TODAY? TRANSMISSION OF MICROBES THROUGH PARENTAL CARE IN A TELEOST FISH Lyndsey Adams, Jodee Hunt, Aaron Koch Grand Valley State University, United States; Email:[email protected] Previous work has postulated that microbial sharing, the transfer of bacteria between group members, is an underappreciated benefit of, and potential mechanism for, the evolution of social living. Considerable research has addressed this in birds and mammals, but none has examined the phenomenon in teleost fishes. Although parental care is unusual among teleosts, all known species in the family Cichlidae provide parental care. This study's objective is to compare microbes associated with parental convict cichlids (Archocentrus nigrofasciatus) to those associated with subsets of broods receiving parental care and others where parental contact is prevented. We used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) to detect the presence of microbes in parents and offspring. Preliminary results demonstrate that parent-offspring contact facilitates microbial transfer - offspring receiving care have a greater diversity of microbes compared to those on siblings that do not. This research represents a novel contribution to the study of parental care and the evolution of social behavior in fishes. 296 Contributed Talk: COGNITION AND LEARNING VI (Friday AM) EXPANDING OUR THINKING ABOUT ANIMAL COGNITION: OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING IN JUMPING SPIDERS R. Matt Adams, Alan Kamil University of Nebraska, Lincoln, United States; Email:[email protected] Observational learning is considered a cognitively challenging task. Given their relatively simple brains, it seems unlikely that arthropods would be capable of learning in this fashion. However, some jumping spiders (family Salticidae) possess advanced cognitive capabilities. Salticids also have very acute vision that is comparable to humans' in terms of both detail and perceived hues. Given the unique physiology and natural history of salticids, I hypothesized that salticids might be capable of learning about novel prey solely by watching a conspecific interact with the prey item, i.e. through observational learning. My most recent experiment established that salticids are capable of observational learning. Salticids were given the opportunity to watch one of two movies during which a conspecific either fed on or rejected (because of a mild electric shock) a novel prey item. Spiders were then given the chance to hunt a live milkweed bug. Animals that saw the prey rejected exhibited several alterations in behavior compared to the control treatment, including a significantly increased latency to attack the prey. Future work will focus on mechanism and stimulus generalization. 301 Contributed Talk: COMMUNICATION V (Friday AM) AGGRESSIVENESS AND SIGNALING IN SONG SPARROWS ARE CONSISTENT OVER TIME Caglar Akcay, Mari Tom, S. Campbell, Michael Beecher University of Washington, United States; Email:[email protected] Individual differences in animals that are consistent over extended periods of time are referred to as behavioral syndromes or personalities. We examined consistency over time in aggressive behavior and signaling of male song sparrows. We quantified individual differences in aggression and aggressive signaling in our resident population through a series of repeated aggression assays conducted at five points throughout a year from September 2009 through May 2010. We challenged each subject with 10 min of song playback from his center of the territory. We measured aggressive behavior (flights, closest approach to the speaker, and time spent within 5 m of the speaker) and signaling (wing waves, soft songs, and loud songs). We found that aggression and 2 | Behavior 2011 signaling were highly repeatable (both around 0.5); moreover, repeatability did not decrease over time. Aggressive behavior and aggressive signaling were themselves correlated (r = 0.67). We also found that high levels of aggression were spatially correlated. We will discuss the extent to which aggressive