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Hausberger, M., Fureix, C., Bourjade, M., Wessel-Robert, S., & Richard-Yris, M. - A. (2012). On the significance of adult play: what does social play tell us about adult horse welfare? Naturwissenschaften, 99(4), 291–302.
Abstract: Play remains a mystery and adult play even more so. More typical of young stages in healthy individuals, it occurs rarely at adult stages but then more often in captive/domestic animals, which can imply spatial, social and/or feeding deprivations or restrictions that are challenging to welfare, than in animals living in natural conditions. Here, we tested the hypothesis that adult play may reflect altered welfare states and chronic stress in horses, in which, as in several species, play rarely occurs at adult stages in natural conditions. We observed the behaviour (in particular, social play) of riding school horses during occasional outings in a paddock and measured several stress indicators when these horses were in their individual home boxes. Our results revealed that (1) the number of horses and rates of adult play appeared very high compared to field report data and (2) most stress indicators measured differed between ‘players’ and ‘non-players’, revealing that most ‘playful’ animals were suffering from more chronic stress than ‘non-playful’ horses. Frequency of play behaviour correlated with a score of chronic stress. This first discovery of a relationship between adult play and altered welfare opens new lines of research that certainly deserves comparative studies in a variety of species.
Keywords: Social play; Stress indicators; Animal welfare; Domestic horse
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Dugatkin LA. (2007). Developmental environment, cultural transmission, and mate choice copying. Naturwissenschaften, 94(8), 651–656.
Abstract: Using female mate choice copying as a rudimentary form of cultural transmission, this study provides evidence that social environment during development has a significant effect on the tendency to use culturally acquired information. Groups of newborn guppies (Poecilia reticulata) were raised for 35 days in 1 of 5 “developmental environments”. Groups of 15 newborns were raised in pools with no adults (treatment 1), both adult male and female guppies (treatments 2 and 3), only adult females (treatment 4) or only adult males (treatment 5). Mature females raised in treatments 1 and 2, but not treatments 3, 4, and 5, copied the mate choice of others. Treatments 1 and 2 correspond to social structures that guppies experience during their development in the wild. Newborn guppies swim together in shoals (analogous to treatment 1). As they mature, juveniles join schools of adult males and females (analogous to treatments 2). At no time during the normal developmental process are juveniles found with males, but only unreceptive females (as was the case for long periods in treatment 3) or in the presence of adults of only one sex (analogous to treatments 4 and 5). As such, normal developmental environments prime guppies for cultural transmission, while unnatural environments fail to do so.
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Staunton, H. (2005). Mammalian sleep. Naturwissenschaften, 92(5), 203–220.
Abstract: This review examines the biological background to the development of ideas on rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep), so-called paradoxical sleep (PS), and its relation to dreaming. Aspects of the phenomenon which are discussed include physiological changes and their anatomical location, the effects of total and selective sleep deprivation in the human and animal, and REM sleep behavior disorder, the latter with its clinical manifestations in the human. Although dreaming also occurs in other sleep phases (non-REM or NREM sleep), in the human, there is a contingent relation between REM sleep and dreaming. Thus, REM is taken as a marker for dreaming and as REM is distributed ubiquitously throughout the mammalian class, it is suggested that other mammals also dream. It is suggested that the overall function of REM sleep/dreaming is more important than the content of the individual dream; its function is to place the dreamer protagonist/observer on the topographical world. This has importance for the developing infant who needs to develop a sense of self and separateness from the world which it requires to navigate and from which it is separated for long periods in sleep. Dreaming may also serve to maintain a sense of 'I'ness or “self” in the adult, in whom a fragility of this faculty is revealed in neurological disorders.
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Dugatkin, L. A. (2002). Animal cooperation among unrelated individuals. Naturwissenschaften, 89(12), 533–541.
Abstract: The evolution of cooperation has long been a topic near and dear to the hearts of behavioral and evolutionary ecologists. Cooperative behaviors run the gamut from fairly simple to very complicated and there are a myriad of ways to study cooperation. Here I shall focus on three paths that have been delineated in the study of intraspecific cooperation among unrelated individuals: reciprocity, byproduct mutualism, and group selection. In each case, I attempt to delineate the theory underlying each of these paths and then provide examples from the empirical literature. In addition, I shall briefly touch upon some recent work that has attempted to examine (or re-examine) the role of cognition and phylogeny in the study of cooperative behavior. While empirical and theoretical work has made significant strides in the name of better understanding the evolution and maintenance of cooperative behavior in animals, much work remains for the future. “From the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level as the gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight; whereby the strongest, the swiftest and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumb down, as no quarter is given em leader the weakest and the stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and the shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in any other way, survived. Life was a continuous free fight, and em leader a war of each against all was the normal state of existence.” (Huxley 1888)
Keywords: Animals; Phylogeny; *Social Behavior; Species Specificity
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Fricke, H. W. (1973). Individual partner recognition in fish: field studies on Amphiprion bicinctus. Naturwissenschaften, 60(4), 204–205.
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