El Grupo de Discusion de Comportamiento Animal (GDCA), meets once a week to discuss literature on a broad range of topics and their potential implications for understanding the behavior of animals and plants. Yes, plants also behave. We meet on Fridays from 11:00am – 12:15pm in Tucker 111, Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia. Most Fridays the discussion will be a joint enterprise between GDCA and our colleagues at University of Missouri, St. Louis, who will be joining us in “cyber-space.”
For any questions, or to be added to our e-mail list, please contact Manuel Leal (lealm[at]missouri[dot]edu)
Papers for Friday, Oct 7, 2016
Decision making in bumblebees, and the possibility of “emotion-like” states in bumblebees
Mendel_&_Paul_2016; Perry_et_al_2016
Papers for Friday, Oct 21, 2016
Nectar-feeding and echolocation in bats
Papers for Friday, Oct 28, 2016
Homing behavior in a non-migratory bird species. Can a cognitive map explain homing success?
Papers for Friday, Nov 4th, 2016
Phenotypic plasticity and developmental responses of frogs to predation.
Papers for Friday, Nov 11, 2016
Brain size evolution. For this week, we will explore a long standing question in brain evolution, particularly at the species level. Is variation between individuals due to genes or is environment the major contributor? Note: people at UMSL are only reading (Walsh_etal_016), also, each group will discuss the papers first and then joined at 11:40 to share questions, ideas or concerns.
Paper for Friday, Nov 18, 2016
Mechanisms for egg-laying aversion in insects (flies). In other words, can poo, mediate egg-laying aversion in flies. Yes, poo, is not a typo, although there is also data from dung beetles, and lions and much more.
Papers for Friday, Dec 2, 2016
Evolution of sexual signaling traits in orchid bees. How fast or slow can sexual signals evolve “complexity of chemical signals” and can we predict the potential direction at the macro-evolutionary scale?