Boldness is a key element of behavioral variation in animals. Many studies have shown variation between individuals in their propensity to take risks across a wide range of taxa, yet surprisingly few studies have investigated the importance of social context in influencing an animal's boldness....

Antipredator defenses in many species have been shown to exhibit phenotypic plasticity in response to variable predation risk. Some evidence suggests that in certain species adults act as proxy predators, triggering the development of adaptive defenses in juveniles where interaction with a...

The composition of an animal group can impact greatly on the survival and success of its individual members. Much recent work has concentrated on behavioral variation within animal populations along the bold/shy continuum. Here, we screened individual guppies, Poecilia reticulata, for boldness...

Although numerous influential models in ecology assume a directly proportional relationship between prey density and prey encounter rate, a recent test of this assumption found that the actual relationship was nonlinear (rising slower than proportionately). Here, three-spined sticklebacks were...

A number of recent articles have investigated the potential of familiarity preferences to influence group membership in free-ranging animals. However, it is not clear to which extent individual recognition or a more general recognition of a group odor is responsible for familiarity preferences....

Social information use is common in a wide range of group-living animals, notably in humans. We investigated social information use by pedestrians in a potentially dangerous scenario: at a road crossing. To judge a safe gap in traffic, pedestrians can use social information, such as the crossing...