animal behavior

Pregnancy hormones help mice prepare to take care of their young by altering activity in neurons.

Division of labor in ant colonies may depend on an enzyme trapped inside the blood-brain barrier.

Some of the foundational studies in the field were neither ethical by today’s standards nor replicable. But we can do better.

The parasite appears to make infected wolves less risk-averse, potentially influencing the behavior of packs.

In a chapter on cats, author Bethany Brookshire explores the thorny issue of felines that live freely.

In Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, I explore what it is that makes an animal a pest—and it has nothing to do with their behavior, but rather our own desires and beliefs about the natural world.

Sounds made by more than 50 vertebrates previously thought to be mute push back the origin of this type of communication by at least 100 million years, a study finds.

In the book's introduction, author Carol Gigliotti makes the case that intricate behavioral patterns can be just as important to conserve as species’ genomes.

When species disappear, more than their genomes are lost. The potential for their creative innovation to benefit ecosystems vanishes as well.

The broken-wing display, in which birds fake being wounded to protect their nests from predators, is found across the avian phylogenetic tree, a study finds.

Other winners of this year’s prizes include research on the physics of ducklings and the therapeutic potential of ice cream.

Australians are resorting to increasingly drastic measures to keep cockatoos out of their garbage bins.

Macaques continued to search for answers to an unsolvable laboratory task, seemingly refusing to believe that the correct answers were random and inconsistent.

Though it’s poetic to say that ants were grieving the bee at a funeral, the reality is a bit more prosaic.

In Chapter 1, “The Science of Animal Dreams,” author David M. Peña-Guzmán relays the history of researchers digging into the mental realities of nonhuman brains.

Pet dogs produce a larger volume of tears when they are reunited with their owners than with acquaintances, possibly because of surging oxytocin levels—findings that could be the first evidence of emotional crying in nonhuman animals.

Research shows that humans aren’t the only animals whose imaginations run wild while they sleep.

In a citizen science project, thousands of pet dogs are helping scientists to understand what happens to memory and cognition in old age.

Female fruit flies assess the physical symmetry of male suitors through the songs they sing, a study claims.