Risk Sensitivity
Animals will often base their decision about where to forage on how variable a resource is as well as the size of the mean reward they can get from it. This is know as risk sensitive foraging. In the image below, a…
Search by month: may 2015
Sex differences in spatial memory
In nature, morphological and behavioral differences among sexes are readily identified, with the exception of cognitive abilities. While the possibility that the sexes differ in their cognition (learning and memory) is…
Spatial vs. Colour cues
In some species, males use spatial cues (distance and direction) and feature cues (a colour or a landmark) to relocate a reward while females only use a feature cues. Maria tested whether female hummingbirds of three…
Spatial navigation in hummingbirds
To test spatial memory, David Pritchard taught hummingbirds to feed from an artificial flower positioned between two landmarks. He then removed the flower and watched to see where each hummingbird searched for it,…
Sunbird fieldwork commences
Ida Bailey is flying to Pretoria, South Africa, to help initiate a research project investigating how flower morphology influences the foraging decision of sunbirds. The research is being conducted in collaboration…