Behavior with Britney

How Do You Tell an Elephant to Back Off? 🐘 Honey, wake up, a new elephant paper just dropped... Elephants avoid fights by doing what?! Fighting can be unnecessarily costly, so animals often benefit from communicating before things get physical. Researchers observed wild African savannah elephants during social conflicts and recorded movements like ear spreading and flapping, trunk movements, and other body gestures. Altogether, they identified 41 different gesture types! After gesturing, elephants frequently paused and monitored the other elephant’s response. When the other elephant didn’t respond in the desired way, the signalling elephant often repeated the gesture or tried another one. Researchers inferred what the elephants were communicating by looking at which response from the recipient caused the gesturing to stop and the interaction to end. From this, they identified two main apparent goals: “move away” and “stop what you’re doing.” Many gestures were used for both goals, meaning the same movement could serve different purposes depending on the situation. These findings suggest that elephants use goal-directed, flexible gestures to influence the behaviour of other elephants during conflicts. Read more: Eleuteri et al. (2026), Animal Cognition doi.org/10.1007/s10071-026-0… @EleuteriVesta @stoegerangela1

Panda Personalities are Linked to Spatial Cognition! 🐼 You read that right... Pandas have personalities! In a Novel Object Test, giant pandas were introduced to three new objects: a wooden stool, a plastic bucket, and a bamboo ball. Two repeatable traits emerged: inhibition and exploration. Interestingly, both personality traits were positively associated with baseline fecal cortisol. Then, in a Resource Change Experiment, pandas searched a grid of paper bowls and bamboo baskets for hidden carrot rewards. After 15 trials, the reward locations were switched for another 15. Personality was linked to performance! Pandas with greater inhibition were more accurate overall, while exploration was more strongly linked to accuracy after the carrot locations changed. Pandas with both higher cortisol and higher inhibition also made fewer turns across the task, suggesting a more focused search strategy. These results suggest that personality is linked to how animals gather and use spatial information. Read more: Jiang et al. (2026), Integrative Zoology doi.org/10.1111/1749-4877.70…

When Life Gets Unpredictable, Zebrafish Look to Their Friends! 🐟 For three months, we kept zebrafish in either a stable environment or an unpredictable one, where their physical (water temperature, feeding times, and habitat complexity) and social (group size and group membership) environments changed frequently and unpredictably. Across six behavioural tests, fish from unpredictable environments showed more information-seeking behaviour, paid greater attention to social information, and swam closer together than fish from stable environments. Things got especially interesting when the fish received social information that conflicted with their own information... After being trained for a week to find food at one feeder, they then watched other zebrafish eating at the opposite feeder. Fish from unpredictable environments were more likely to change their preference, using the new social information over what they had previously learned compared with fish from the stable environment. This suggests that living in an unpredictable environment can change the perceived value of information across contexts, giving more weight to recent social information than older personal information, independent of the information quality itself. When environments change fast, information can become outdated quickly, so keeping a closer eye on others may help animals respond more effectively to changing conditions... Read more: Sekulovski & Miller (2026), Behavioral Ecology doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arag0…

Bigger Groups, Brighter Birds? 🐦 Social life can be mentally demanding, but could living in a bigger group make you smarter? Wild Australian magpies live in groups that vary in size, but their groups remain highly stable. To test differences between individual birds from groups of different sizes, researchers placed small puzzles in front of them (this wild population was very habituated), where solving the task meant finding a mozzarella reward. They found that birds from larger groups performed better across multiple cognitive tasks, including inhibitory control, associative learning, reversal learning and spatial memory. Birds that did well on one task also tended to do well on the others. These differences could not be explained by food intake, body size, neophobia, attention to the tasks or social assortment. Juveniles did not show a clear group-size effect at first, but by 200 and 300 days after fledging, birds from larger groups showed stronger cognitive performance. This suggests that growing up in larger social groups supports cognitive development. And their cognition scores mattered! Females with better cognitive performance had more hatched clutches, produced more fledglings, and had more fledglings survive to independence, suggesting that higher scores on these cognitive tasks were linked to real fitness benefits. Read more: doi.org/10.1038/nature25503

Bats aren't blind, they're just getting tricked! 🦇 Despite the old saying, bats are not blind. In fact, they often use vision to orient themselves and avoid obstacles while flying, not just echolocation. However, wind turbine fatalities are a serious source of mortality for migratory bats, including hoary bats and silver-haired bats. Estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of bats are killed annually at wind facilities in the United States alone, which may threaten the long-term viability of these species. These deaths may not be random. Previous studies have found higher bat activity near turbines. So why would animals that can both see and echolocate fly so close to them? A new study suggests one possible answer: bats may be visually attracted to bright, reflective turbine surfaces. Researchers tested both hoary bats and silver-haired bats in a large flight Y-maze. One exit had a white turbine blade section lit with artificial moonlight. The other had a darker option: a black lit blade, a black unlit blade, or an empty dark exit. Both species chose the white turbine surface more often: hoary bats chose it in 74% of trials, while silver-haired bats chose it in 97% of trials. The bright surface seemed to attract them. The researchers suggest that white turbine surfaces may reflect moonlight in a way that makes them look like open sky. In nature, flying toward brightness can help bats find open space. But around wind turbines, that useful cue becomes dangerous by drawing bats closer to spinning blades. Thus, turbines likely act as ecological traps: human-made structures that mimic a normally helpful cue, but lead animals into danger. This study has strong potential to inspire real-world change, while reminding us that when we build in the natural world, we need to consider the wildlife that may encounter these structures and their unique sensory experiences. Read more: doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2025.02… @KAJonasson

Stress Isn't All Bad 🐒 While too much stress may shorten your lifespan, not enough might not be too good either! Researchers found that wild capuchins with higher stress responses to small droughts were twice as likely to survive the massive El Niño drought. This is compelling evidence that stress responsiveness can boost survival during extreme times. But, it wasn’t that others failed to respond to unusual environmental change... They just showed the opposite pattern: reacting more to heavier-than-normal rainfall. So, the monkeys that did not survive the massive drought might have been the survivors if the catastrophe had been a flood instead! The discovery of these stress phenotypes shows how behavioural diversity supports the survival of a species, since multiple strategies (opposite stress responses) may be adaptive under different extremes. Read more: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adq50… @scarrera11

Family Dinner Just Got a Whole Lot More... Competitive? 🐟 Animals (including us) often eat more when others are around. But why? Is it copying? Feeling safer? Getting distracted? Or does simply having others nearby flip a competitive switch? To test this, we studied zebrafish and gave them an audience behind glass. These passive observers could be seen, but had no access to food, meaning no copying and no real competition. Even then, the fish changed how they ate: they consumed more, manipulated their food more, and showed clear competitive behaviors: Males turned away from the audience when manipulating food, while females held food in their mouths longer when swallowing wasn’t possible, both as if avoiding potential “food thieves.” Our findings show that a passive audience alone can alter feeding behavior, and that the roots of “social eating” run deeper than mimicry. Sometimes just being watched is enough to boost motivation... possibly through perceived competition. Read more: doi.org/10.3758/s13420-025-0…

Feeling Shy? You Might Just Be Sensitive! 🦀 A new study on hermit crabs found that those with a more sensitive sense were less bold. Researchers measured how long crabs hid after being poked in a startle test and found that crabs with more tiny sensory hairs (sensilla) on their claws stayed hidden for longer and reacted more predictably. Meanwhile, bolder crabs had fewer of these sensory hairs. It makes sense that if you feel more, you might react more strongly. But why do some crabs have more sensory hairs than others? This study suggests a sensory investment syndrome: a possible trade-off between sensing more and doing more! Read more: doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.… @Ari_Drummond @Lucymturner @mark_briffa

Breeding Out Fear Increases Playfulness 🐔 Play isn’t just for people or pets! It’s found all across the animal kingdom. And now, new research shows it may also be tied to something unexpected: domestication. In this study, researchers looked at red junglefowl (the wild ancestors of domestic chickens) and bred them over 14 generations to be either more or less fearful of humans. The goal was to see if this change in fear would lead to other changes in behavior. They found that the more “tame” birds/those less afraid of humans, played more overall than their fearful counterparts. But not all play was the same. The tame birds showed more object play (like chasing toys) and locomotor play (running or spinning), while the fearful birds actually played more socially (sparring and bouncing around with each other), more like their wild relatives. Because the researchers bred birds based specifically on how afraid they were of humans, they could clearly trace how tameness itself influenced behavior, offering new insight into how traits like playfulness evolve. Read more: royalsocietypublishing.org/d…

Horses Learn by Eavesdropping on Us 🐎 In this study, researchers found that 12 out of 17 horses changed their feeding behavior after eavesdropping on a human-human interaction. When a familiar person either praised or scolded another person for eating from a certain bucket, the horses later chose the “approved” bucket, even when the people were no longer present. The effect was even stronger in horses kept in social groups compared to those kept in isolation. That means social experience might shape how well animals pick up on and learn from human behavior. This is the first evidence that horses can form feeding preferences just by watching how humans treat each other. Read more: link.springer.com/article/10…