The actions and responses of animals, studied through their mechanisms, development, functions and evolutionary history.
Consumption of remains of dead organisms. It can remove, disarticulate and transport material before burial.
locomotion by jumps. Skeletal geometry can constrain jumping capability but does not establish the exclusive behaviour of an extinct organism.
Behaviour whose expression depends on properties such as condition, age, reproductive state or current social position.
A mapping from perceived social information and internal state to action. A stable mapping can generate flexible actions when its inputs change.
A regulated behavioural and physiological state identified through converging criteria including reversibility, responsiveness and homeostatic regulation. Immobility alone does not establish sleep.
Searching for, acquiring and handling food. Tests distinguish resource-specific actions from general movement or appetite.
Coordinated changes in activity, appetite and social or other motivations associated with immune activation. Context dependence and experimental controls distinguish it from simple incapacity.
Use of substances or actions that reduce harm from parasites or disease. Tests require a health benefit, a relevant behavioural response and controls against ordinary nutritional preference.
Parental use or selection of substances that reduce disease in offspring. A benefit to offspring does not imply treatment or cure of the parent.
Sensory and behavioural processes reducing exposure to pathogens, such as avoidance of contamination. This broader defence usage should be distinguished from cellular and molecular immunity.
Removal or avoidance of contaminated material or infected individuals, potentially reducing exposure of an individual or group to pathogens. disease reduction must be measured rather than inferred from cleaning alone.
Transmission of information between animals through signals or cues, assessed through effects on receivers.
Discrimination among potential social or mating partners according to species-associated information. Recognition errors and discrimination costs affect its evolution.
Use of a signal by an unintended receiver, such as a predator detecting a mating call. This can impose selection opposed to intended-receiver attraction.
An informative feature not necessarily evolved for the receiver’s response. Distinguishing cues from signals requires an evolutionary argument, not just evidence of information transfer.
A feature or action shaped by selection for its effects on a receiver, with receiver responses also subject to selection. A merely informative incidental feature can instead be a biological cue.
A relation between a signal and a property relevant to its receiver. Honesty can follow aligned interests, physical constraints or differential costs and benefits; high production cost alone does not establish it.
Signalling in which costs contribute to the evolutionary incentives governing expression. Reliability depends on differences in net payoffs among signaller types, not merely on a signal being expensive.
A signal whose relation to the advertised property is constrained by its production mechanism. The receiver’s use and the relevant physical constraint should both be tested.
Communication using more than one sensory modality. Components can supply redundant information, different information or context-dependent detection benefits.
The sensory channel through which a signal acts, such as acoustic, visual, chemical, mechanical or electrical stimulation.
Use of a warning signal associated with defence. A conspicuous colour pattern alone does not establish either effective defence or predator avoidance.
Behaviour by a parent affecting offspring survival or development, including provisioning, defence and control of the developmental environment. Its costs and benefits need separate measurement.
Care supplied by both parents. It can create shared offspring benefits alongside conflict over which parent bears the costs.
Conditional adjustment of care in response to a partner, offspring or the environment. A matching response can reflect information about brood demand rather than absence of conflict.
An increase in care following a partner’s reduction that replaces less than the entire lost contribution. The predicted response depends on information, costs and the time available to adjust.
An allocation to current offspring that carries an opportunity cost for other reproductive opportunities. Time spent near offspring is not automatically an investment of the same value in both sexes.
Information concerning the probability that offspring are genetically sired by a male. Its effect on care depends on detection, future mating opportunities and effects on offspring, not only average extra-pair paternity.
Biological material passed from one individual's body to another and capable of influencing the receiver. Simply carrying external food is not sufficient for the narrower framework; donor-processed or donor-produced components matter.
Maternal behaviour supplying offspring with resources and potentially bioactive transferred material. Resource quantity and material composition can affect offspring differently.
A provisioned dung mass surrounding the developmental site of an individual dung-beetle offspring. Its food quantity and maternal contributions can be manipulated separately.
Maternal faecal material associated with the egg chamber in certain dung beetles. Ingested material can provide an indirect route of maternal microbial transfer.
Use of mirror information in recognizing one's own body. A particular test outcome does not establish all forms of self-representation or theory of mind.
An assay asking whether an animal uses reflected information to investigate an otherwise unseen mark on its own body. Visible and sham marks, absence of the mirror and independent detection or action controls constrain the interpretation.
Monitoring or control of one's own cognitive processing, assessed through measures such as information seeking or uncertainty responses. Success need not imply introspective awareness.
Storage of food for future use, which creates opportunities for both memory and competition over stored resources.
Looking towards a predicted future action or event before it occurs. Gaze measures require prespecified regions, timing and exclusions.
An internal state or process used in representing information about the world, self or others. Behavioural tests should distinguish its proposed content from simpler predictive rules.
Representation of aspects of one's own body, knowledge or actions. These components need not entail an autobiographical or linguistically expressed concept of self.
Awareness involving oneself as an object or subject of representation. Its proposed forms must be operationally distinguished; bodily self-recognition does not alone establish reflective or autobiographical awareness.
An action-related representation of bodily configuration and capacities. Its functional use need not entail a verbal or autobiographical concept of self.
Identification of one’s own body or body-related sensory information. It is narrower than reflective knowledge of one’s identity and does not alone demonstrate theory of mind.
Attribution or representation of mental states in oneself or others to explain or predict behaviour. Component abilities need not form an all-or-none package.
Interpreting another agent's action in relation to an outcome it is pursuing. It can be narrower than representing the agent's beliefs or intentions in a human-like way.
Representing an agent's belief as differing from reality and predicting action accordingly. False belief, ignorance and a correct remembered location require different controls.
Tracking another individual's informational access or knowledge. Success does not automatically imply understanding false belief.
Using differences in visual access between individuals. Knowing what another can see differs from representing exactly how an object appears to them.
A change in responses to ambiguous stimuli relative to trained reference stimuli. Motivation, general activity and perceptual discrimination require control.
Attribution of human-like properties to non-human animals. Its evidential risk depends on whether the attributed mechanism is tested rather than assumed.
The study of conscious experience in non-human animals. Behavioural and neural evidence can constrain hypotheses without directly providing another individual's standpoint.
Change in performance or behaviour through experience, distinguished from immediate sensory responses, fatigue and maturation.
Changes in predatory responses through experience, including association of prey signals with unprofitability. Experiments must distinguish learning from immediate avoidance and from loss of appetite.
Learning influenced by other individuals or their products. Its mechanism can range from attention to a location to acquisition of more detailed behavioural information.
Transmission of acquired information or behavioural patterns between individuals or generations through social processes. It need not follow genetic parentage.
Differential use or selection of habitats, which can affect exposure to resources, mates and selection.
Repeated use of a host type across life stages or generations. Host-associated mating can translate host fidelity into partial reproductive isolation.
Biological study of animal behaviour, combining observation, experiments and evolutionary explanation.
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