COVID-19 lockdown allows researchers to quantify the effects of human activity on wildlife Reduced human mobility during the pandemic will reveal critical aspects of our impact on animals, providing important guidance on how best to share space on this crowded planet.
The term 'biologging' refers to the use of miniaturized animal-attached tags for logging and/or relaying of data about an animal's movements, behaviour, physiology and/or environment. Biologging technology substantially extends our abilities to observe, and take measurements from, free-ranging, undisturbed subjects, providing much scope for advancing both basic and applied biological research. Here, we review highlights from the third international conference on biologging science, which was held in California, USA, from 1 to 5 September 2008. Over the last few years, considerable progress has been made with a range of recording technologies as well as with the management, visualization, integration and analysis of increasingly large and complex biologging datasets. Researchers use these techniques to study animal biology with an unprecedented level of detail and across the full range of ecological scales-from the split-second decision making of individuals to the long-term dynamics of populations, and even entire communities. We conclude our report by suggesting some directions for future research.
A common raven (Corvus corax) engages with an experimental task that is mounted above the ground. T en years ago this week, researchers pointed out that many important findings in human experimental psychology cannot be generalized because study participants are predominantly drawn from a small, unrepresentative subset of the world's population: societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, and enable potential biases to be declared and discussed when publishing completed work.
1. The paradigm-changing opportunities of biologging sensors for ecological research, especially movement ecology, are vast, but the crucial questions of how best to match the most appropriate sensors and sensor combinations to specific biological questions and how to analyse complex biologging data, are mostly ignored.2. Here, we fill this gap by reviewing how to optimize the use of biologging techniques to answer questions in movement ecology and synthesize this into an Integrated Biologging Framework (IBF).3. We highlight that multisensor approaches are a new frontier in biologging, while identifying current limitations and avenues for future development in sensor technology.4. We focus on the importance of efficient data exploration, and more advanced multidimensional visualization methods, combined with appropriate archiving and sharing approaches, to tackle the big data issues presented by biologging. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities in matching the peculiarities of specific sensor data to the statistical models used, highlighting at the same time the large advances which will be required in the latter to properly analyse biologging data.
New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) are the most prolific avian tool-users. Regional variation in the shape of their tools may be the result of cumulative cultural evolution--a phenomenon considered to be a hallmark of human culture. Here we show that hand-raised juvenile New Caledonian crows spontaneously manufacture and use tools, without any contact with adults of their species or any prior demonstration by humans. Our finding is a crucial step towards producing informed models of cultural transmission in this species, and in animals in general.
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