Pneumatic Octobot: Soft Autonomous Robot Octopus 3D-Printed By Harvard Scientists
http://www.ibtimes.com/pneumatic-octobot-soft-autonomous-robot-octopus-3d-printed-harvard-scientists-2406868
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julie
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julie
Multilevel animal societies can emerge from cultural transmission Maurício Cantor, Lauren G. Shoemaker, Reniel B. Cabral, César O. Flores, Melinda Varga & Hal Whitehead Multilevel societies, containing hierarchically nested social levels, are remarkable social structures whose origins are unclear. The social relationships of sperm whales are organized in a multilevel society with an upper level composed of clans of individuals communicating using similar patterns of clicks (codas). Using agent-based models informed by an 18-year empirical study, we show that clans are unlikely products of stochastic processes (genetic or cultural drift) but likely originate from cultural transmission via biased social learning of codas. Distinct clusters of individuals with similar acoustic repertoires, mirroring the empirical clans, emerge when whales learn preferentially the most common codas (conformism) from behaviourally similar individuals (homophily). Cultural transmission seems key in the partitioning of sperm whales into sympatric clans. These findings suggest that processes similar to those that generate complex human cultures could not only be at play in non-human societies but also create multilevel social structures in the wild.
http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9091 -
julie
Robustness of flight leadership relations in pigeons Andrea Flack, Zsuzsa Ákos, Máté Nagy, Tamás Vicsek, Dora Biro (Submitted on 25 Oct 2016) Collective animal movements produce spectacular natural phenomena that arise from simple local interactions among group members. Flocks of homing pigeons, Columba livia, provide a useful model for the study of collective motion and decision making. During homing flights, flock members are forced to resolve potentially divergent navigational preferences in order to stay together and benefit from flying in a group. Recent work has demonstrated that some individuals consistently contribute more to the movement decisions of the flock than others do, thereby generating stable hierarchical leader/follower networks. Yet, what attributes of a flying pigeon reliably predict leadership remains an open question. We examined the flexibility of an individual’s hierarchical leadership rank (i.e. its ordinal position when flock members are ranked according to the average time differences with which they lead or follow others) as a function of changes in its navigational knowledge. We manipulated already established hierarchical networks in three different flocks, by providing certain individuals with additional homing experience. We found that such training did not consistently lead to an increase in birds’ leadership ranks, and that, in general, the nature of leader/follower interactions between trained and untrained birds remained unaffected. Thus, leadership hierarchies in pigeon flocks appear resistant to changes in the navigational knowledge of a subset of their members, at least when these changes are relatively small. We discuss the implications of our results in light of the potential benefits of structural stability in decision-making networks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07784 -
julie
Movebank – animal track data hosting
https://www.movebank.org/
Movebank is a free, online database of animal tracking data hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. We help animal tracking researchers to manage, share, protect, analyze, and archive their data. Movebank is an international project with over 11,000 users, including people from research and conservation groups around the world. -
julie
http://icarusinitiative.org/about-icarus
The goal of the ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) Initiative is to observe global migratory movements of small animals through a satellite system.
Global data about animal movements are indispensable in our today international networked world to understand how to safe human health and wildlife simultaneously.