Virtual Issues
Current Virtual Issue
Behavioral ecology is concerned with how organisms’ ecology influences their physiology and behaviour to produce adaptive outcomes. As such, it is the study of context and variation. Getting to grips with functional diversity means attending to both the time-scale of responses shown, and the degree of reversibility they display. In this virtual special issue, we present an array of invited ideas, reviews and original articles that consider various aspects of phenotypic plasticity (the expression of environment-dependent phenotypes) and flexibility (reversible within-individual phenotypic adjustments in physiology and behaviour) across a diverse array of taxa, behaviours and ecologies.
Previous Virtual Issues
Behavioural Ecology as a discipline has focused on the adaptive value of behavioural strategies, and how these vary with ecological context. This, in turn, was a response to Niko Tinbergen’s plea for greater attention to studies of survival value, as articulated in his classic 1963 paper, On the Aims and Methods of Ethology. In this paper, Tinbergen discussed the various ways in which one could ask why an organism behaved as it did.
Sexual selection research has been a predominant theme of research published in Behavioral Ecology since its first issue in 1990, and 2021 saw the 150th Anniversary of Darwin’s seminal work on sexual selection published in 1871. You would think that there is not much left to learn. However, as the papers in this virtual issue show, we have much to learn. Our invited review asks whether in fact we need to redefine what we mean by sexual selection, with a change in focus from mating to fertilization.
Animals can obtain important fitness enhancing information from their social environment. An individual can find food or avoid predators by paying attention to the behaviour of others. Males and females can also reduce the costs of mate searching, or improve on the quality of their mating partners by copying the choices made by others. The phenomenon of mate choice copying is highlighted in this virtual issue.
The World is becoming increasingly urbanized. Human energy-generation and transport-networks are infiltrating natural ecosystems, increasing the levels of anthropogenic noise. Behavioral ecologists are increasingly finding that noise pollution can have profound effects on animals, increasing levels of stress, and affecting their ability to find mates or avoid predators. If we are to successfully manage noise pollution...
Animal contest theory has a rich history that has been integral to the development of behavioral ecology as a discipline. Animals often fight for access to food and mates. In the early 1970s, John Maynard-Smith and George Price used the theory of games to predict how contests might be resolved, introducing to the study of behavior the evolutionary stable strategy approach which heralded the birth...
2020 marks the 50th year since the publication of Geoff Parker’s influential paper Sperm Competition and its Evolutionary Consequence in the Insects. Parker’s work throughout the 1960’s focused on quantifying the fitness costs and benefits associated with individual behavior of the yellow dungfly, Scatophaga stercoraria. In so doing he was a key figure in the development of behavioral ecology...
Social network analysis is a valuable new tool in the study of relationships among individuals within societies. Social network analysis is being increasingly employed in behavioral ecology research and is providing novel insight into a range of ecological and evolutionary processes, including mating systems, dominance relationships, patterns of sexual selection, foraging dynamics, gene flow...
Our understanding of sexual selection comes largely from studies of competition among males for access to females and female choice, with the products of sexual selection including exaggerated male weapons and ornaments. In contrast sexual selection acting on females is poorly understood, and indeed highly debated. In this virtual issue we revisit this debate and highlight some of the articles...
The visual capacity of animals is largely responsible for the evolution of animal coloration, because it provides the mechanism by which color is selected in signalers by receivers. Color vision helps animals find food, females (and males) to choose their mates, and parents to distribute care optimally among their young, with evolutionary consequences for extravagant sexual signaling, crypsis...
With the loss of Amotz Zahavi on Friday, 12th May 2017, we celebrate his most influential contribution to behavioral ecology, the Handicap Principle. Zahavi argued that exaggerated secondary sexual traits evolved precisely because they were costly for males to produce, and thereby signalled to females their underlying genetic condition. He later extended this principle to all forms of animal...
The last ten years has seen a surge in interest in the evolutionary significance of consistent individual differences in behavior, a paradigm that has been labeled animal personality. In this virtual issue our Invited Review asks whether the field of animal personality has delivered any new insights for behavioral ecology, and whether it is simply a re-branding of well-established concepts...
Conspicuous colors are often used by prey to advertise their toxicity to predators. Some species have evolved similar color patterns to toxic prey, capitalizing on the tendency for predators to learn to avoid conspicuously signaling toxic prey. Mimicry can extend to behavioural and acoustic mimicry, while aposematic coloration can evolve secondary functions in signaling to competitors...
Males and females often disagree on how much care each parent should provide. In this virtual issue we bring together a series of theoretical and empirical studies that have considered how sexual conflict over care can be resolved. In their invited review, Matthieu Paquet and Per T. Smiseth provide evidence to suggest that maternal effects provide females with a mechanism for manipulating male...
Behavioral ecologists study how biotic and abiotic factors shape the behavior of animals. A new paradigm emerging in behavioral ecology research is focused on how anthropogenic changes to the environment might select for evolutionary changes in animal behavior. Can animals adapt to an increasingly human modified environment? In their Invited Review Wong and Candolin provide an overview of this...
Read a virtual issue of Behavioral Ecology featuring papers on the subject of Cognition.
The publication of this issue marks the 25th anniversary of Behavioral Ecology, the flagship journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE). The society itself was founded in 1986 at its first meeting held in Albany, New York, with the purpose of promoting the study of behavior within an evolutionary and ecological context through regular biennial meetings and the development...
This virtual issue highlights contributions to Behavioral Ecology on Human behavioral ecology. In their invited review, Nettle and colleagues provide a thorough and thought-provoking synthesis of the current state of human behavioral ecology; the study of human behavior from an adaptive perspective. Nettle et al. identify a weakness in current human behavioral ecology research due to its relative...
