News by Subject Social & Behavior

In a recent study published in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from Germany and the United Kingdom assessed how experience with dogs affects humans' ability to recognize dog emotions. Participants who grew up in a cultural context with a dog-friendly attitude were more proficient at recognizing dog emotions. This suggests that the ability to recognize dogs' expressions is learned through age and experience and is not an evolutionary adaptation.

Global Wildlife Conservation and partners Southern Institute of Ecology and Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research have rediscovered a species lost to science since 1990 called a silver-backed chevrotain -- a deer-like species that is the size of a rabbit, has a silver sheen, and has been hanging on in a region of Vietnam ravaged by poaching by snares.

A horse will blink less and twitch its eyelids more when it's under mild stress, the research team found -- a new finding that could offer handlers a simple, easy-to-spot sign their animal is becoming agitated.

Red deer living on the Isle of Rum, on the west coast of Scotland, have been giving birth earlier and earlier since the 1980s, at a rate of about three days per decade. New results publishing on November 5 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology now show that genetic change due to natural selection is partly contributing to the change: red deer are evolving.

Vampire bats that share food and groom each other in captivity are more likely to stick together when they're released back into the wild, find researchers in a study reported on Oct. 31 in the journal Current Biology. While most previous evidence of 'friendship' in animals comes from research in primates, these findings suggest that vampire bats can also form cooperative, friendship-like social relationships .