In a paper in Nature in 1992, Peter Berthold, Andreas Helbig, Gabriele Mohr and Ulrich Querner provided experimental evidence to show that central European blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) had evolved a new winter migration route, and established a new winter home over 1000 km away from their old...
Behaviour
Revisiting Kilner et al. 1999
In 1999, Rebecca Kilner, David Noble and Nick Davies published a paper in Nature showing how the common cuckoo exploits the sensory predispositions of its host, the reed warbler, to obtain the same amount of care that the latter would give a brood of its own chicks. Seventeen years after the paper...
Revisiting Clayton and Dickinson 1998
In 1998, Nicola Clayton and Anthony Dickinson published a paper in Nature reporting results of experiments that showed that scrub jays had “episodic-like” memory. This was the first behavioural evidence for this kind of memory from a non-human animal. Eighteen years after the paper was published,...
Revisiting Ryan et al. 1990
In 1990, Michael Ryan, James Fox, Walter Wilczynski and Stanley Rand published a paper in Nature showing that, during courtship, male Tungara frogs exploit a pre-existing neural bias in females towards lower-pitched calls. This experiment provided evidence in support of a third hypothesis for the...
Revisiting Møller 1988
In 1988, Anders Pape Møller published a paper showing that male barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) with experimentally-lengthened tails obtained mates quicker that males with shorter tails. While this wasn't the first experimental demonstration of the function of male secondary sexual ornaments,...
Revisiting Wilkinson 1984
In 1984, Gerald Wilkinson published a paper in Nature showing that vampire bats share food in the form of regurgitated blood, within groups that contain both kin and non-kin. This was one of the first clear documentations of reciprocity in animals, and the paper went on to become a citation...
Revisiting Srinivasan et al. 2000
In 2000, Mandyam Srinivasan, Shaowu Zhang, Monika Altwein and Jürgen Tautz published a paper in Science showing that bees estimated distance travelled during flights by “the extent to which the image of the world has moved on the eye”. In January 2016, I revisited this paper with Mandyam...