Dogs are usually considered to be trustworthy pets, but a research (or perhaps research-like) study sheds light on dogs’ ability to use deceptive-like (ore perhaps deceptive) behaviour to get their way. The article “Deceptive-like behaviour in dogs” explains an experiment where …dogs had the chance to choose, in the presence of either a cooperative or […]
Tag: animal behavior
Trojan Butterflies
The name is alcon. Maculinea alcon. Like a suave British superspy, or maybe even a trojan horse or the proverbial cute abandoned baby left on a doorstep, some butterfly larvae mimic the chemicals of ants to get worker ants to bring them home to the nest. But that’s not all: as Francesca Barbero and Luca […]
First Rule of Ant Fight Club: Choose a Model for Ant Fight Club
Two ants enter; one ant leaves. (Well, the numbers are actually somewhat larger than that.) In the paper Modeling ant battles by means of a diffusion-limited Gillespie algorithm, biologist Giacomo Santini and his coauthors have proposed two modeling approaches for studying battles among ants. When developing theories (for animal behavior and in other complex systems), […]