Tracking chickens: A promising approach for identifying feather-peckers
Manually observing chickens in barns is a tedious job to which ultra-wideband tracking offers a solution. But does it interfere with normal behavior?
Why it doesn’t seem fair to prefer male mice in behavioral studies
Is it justified to use male mice only in behavioral studies, as many diseases affect men and women differently? This might be the most important argument to favor including female mice in certain studies.
IR backlight in rodent behavioral testing
How do mice act in complete darkness? Ann-Kristina Fritz and her colleagues ordered a large, round open field with IR backlight, custom made by Noldus, to investigate.
Brain & behavior: data integration in horse studies
EEG recordings – they produce useful data, but are not always easy to obtain in animal studies. You can’t really ask a horse to sit still, so these researchers invented a promising new system for EEG recording.
Behavioral tests to select police horses
The personality of police horses influences how well they do in their ‘job’. That’s why personality tests are important for both animal and human welfare and safety.
Video tracking makes bird watching much easier
Everyone with children knows the phenomenon that what is good for a child is not always the best for a parent. The same counts for birds.
Ticking clocks – tides and activity peaks in American horseshoe crabs
Recently, I came across an interesting paper in which American horseshoe crabs were video-tracked to investigate their internal clocks.
Flower preference in solitary bees
Mason bees are fascinating and friendly creatures. Tibor Bukovinszky and his colleagues investigated how their foraging behavior affects their offspring.
Time is of the essence in fish studies
You recently moved into your new house. How do you feel? How do you act in this new space? The answers may depend on how long you have lived there…
Dynamic winners and sluggish losers
We all know the phenomenon: some have it all. Look around a classroom and you see immediately who gets all the attention and who doesn’t, who are “winners”, and who are “losers”. Are we born this way, or do we learn it?