Researchers from The Universities of Manchester and Birmingham have identified the exact nerve cells in the brain that drive important behavioral changes in female fruit flies after they mate.

Humans alter the daily timing of animal activity, potentially reshaping predator–prey interactions. This meta-analysis reveals that larger species tend to “lose” under human disturbance, with large pr...

Abstract. Variation in traits expressed during social interactions can be attributed to direct individual effects (DIEs) of the focal individual’s identity

Documented for 200 years, the Iguanodontia group is expanding with the discovery of a brand-new species, the first known to bear spikes with properties never before observed in dinosaurs.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 5, February 2026. SignificanceZoos play an important role for global biodiversity through education, ex situ conservation, and reintroduction programs. For wildlife species currently threatened in their natural habitats or predicted to decline under future global change, ...

Susoy and Samuel describe a new context-dependent behavior in C. elegans. When cultured on solid surfaces and in liquid, C. elegans males adopt different behavioral strategies—parallel and spiral mati...

Humans and animals learn about the world through targeted and deliberate movement of the head, eyes, hands, and other sensors. A new study demonstrates how the geometry of the rat whisker system simplifies the motor control of active sensing.

Abstract. Recognizing one’s own eggs is crucial for birds, especially for hosts of brood parasites that must identify and reject different-looking parasiti

Analysis of data from pre-implantation genetic testing sheds light on the genetic basis of meiotic-origin aneuploidy, the leading cause of human pregnancy loss, identifying common genetic variants ass...

It may sound like a scene from "Nosferatu," but research from the University of East Anglia shows that humans can use bat-like echolocation skills to judge the distance of objects.

Qian Hu, Yue Wang, Hui Wang, Yu Wang, Xin Xia, Jiliang Xu, Jianqiang Li This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be found here Bird embryos commonly rely …

Cross-Fostering, i.e., the exchange of eggs or hatchlings, is a widely used technique, to disentangle genetic from environmental effects or to manipulate the clutch size. In most bird species, this manipulation is easily accepted by the social parents, leading to the conclusion that fostering has no detrimental effect. Using a dataset of four cohorts (N=298) of zebra finches (Taeniopygia castanotis), in which we fostered routinely a single egg into another nest of zebra finches, we explored potential short- and long-time effects of fostering. Noteworthy, these experiments were not designed to test this hypothesis. The objective of the egg fostering experiments was to test for parental recognition (Caspers et al. 2017) and mate choice decisions (Golueke 2018). Consequently, the aim of the present study is purely explorative. Our study confirmed previous findings that fostering has no short-term effects on the morphology and growth rates of the chicks, neither in males nor in females. However, we found that fostering has a sex-specific long-term effect. Females originating from fostered eggs had a significantly reduced lifespan compared to those from non-fostered eggs. Conversely, the lifespan of fostered males was similar to that of non-fostered males. All birds were housed in large groups, experiencing the same conditions after nutritional independence (day 35). Therefore, we can only speculate that fostering might result in early developmental stress, which may affect the individual fitness of females later in life, ultimately leading to shorter lifespans.