Animal Behavior Research

Cats can be extremely picky when it comes to food. If the cat doesn’t like it, it will refuse to eat. Reason enough for the pet food industry to try to find out what cats really like.

Traditional standard tests with rats or mice are carried out immediately after human interference. Therefore, the behavior of the animals may not be natural and spontaneous.

Fear is something we all know. It changes our behavior: we freeze, try to escape, or respond with aggression. Fear can also cause anxiety, which is a more complex phenomenon.

The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is increasingly being used as model in behavioural, neurobiological and genetic research.

The cerebellum, our “little brain”, is all about motor control; more specifically, it’s about coordination, precision, and timing.

In this experiment, Ison and colleagues looked at the social interaction when a mixed group of primiparous and older, unfamiliar sows were placed in group housing together.

Redgate and colleagues looked into the addition of a monadic phase (a phase in which only one food was offered at a time instead of all of the options) to choice testing.

To examine the response of cichlids to their mirror image, Balzarini et al. used three sympatric species from Lake Tanganyika and did the mirror test for measuring aggression.

We’ve all seen squirrels carrying acorns around in their mouths and burying them in the ground. This is a way to hoard food, and most squirrels use a strategy called scatter-hoarding.

Domestication has a considerable effect on the behavior of animals. The dramatic change in their environment and provision of food alter the need for behaviors such as exploration. But what exactly is the difference?