BACKGROUND Environmental enrichment can enhance expression of species-specific behaviour. While foraging enrichment is encouraged in laboratory animals, its impact on novelty induced behaviour remain largely unknown. PURPOSE Here, we studied behavioural response of mice to acute and subchronic oral monosodium glutamate (MSG) in an open field with /without foraging enrichment. METHODS Adult ...

Copulation preferences in our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, suggest that males prefer older females who have had previous offspring. However, this finding is counter to some behavioral models, which predict that chimpanzee males, as promiscuous breeders with minimal costs to mating, should show little or no preference when choosing mating partners (e.g. should mate indiscriminately)....

This paper investigates the survivable trafficgrooming problem for optical mesh networks employing wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). In the dynamic-provisioning context, a typical connection request may require bandwidth less than that of a wavelength channel, and it may also require protection from network failures, typically fiber cuts. Based on a generic grooming-node architecture, we ...

Parental care has been demonstrated to have important effects on offspring behavioral development. California mice (Peromyscus californicus) are biparental, and correlational evidence suggests that pup retrieving by fathers has important effects on the development of aggressive behavior and extra-hypothalamic vasopressin systems. We tested whether retrievals affected these systems by manipulati...

2mg/kg melanotan II (MTII, administered i.p.), a cyclic peptide analog of alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone, at a single dose increased grooming in naive rats placed in an unfamiliar open-field device without changing locomotion or rearing. Male rats exposed to restraint/immobilization stress (IS) for 1h on three consecutive days displayed increased grooming after the second stressor exposur...

Lice are socially-transmitted ectoparasites. Transmission depends upon their host's degree of contact with conspecifics. While grooming facilitates ectoparasite transmission via body contact, it also constrains their spread through parasite removal. We investigated relations between parasite burden and sociality in female Japanese macaques following two opposing predictions: i) central females ...

In a biological market, individuals seek to maximize their benefits by trading social commodities with the partner offering the highest value. When demand for a partner or commodity is greater than supply, individuals compete for access to the preferred partner by raising the price they are willing to pay. In primates, this model has been used to explain the pattern of grooming between mothers ...

To prevent epidemics, insect societies have evolved collective disease defences that are highly effective at curing exposed individuals and limiting disease transmission to healthy group members. Grooming is an important sanitary behaviour--either performed towards oneself (self-grooming) or towards others (allogrooming)--to remove infectious agents from the body surface of exposed individuals,...

Tra c Grooming and Wavelength Assignment in SONET/WDM Rings1 Xijun Zhang and Chunming Qiao Abstract|In high-speed SONET rings with point-to-point WDM links, the cost of SONET Add-Drop Multiplexers (SADMs) can be dominantly high. However, by grooming tra c (i.e. multiplexing lower rate streams) appropriately and using wavelength ADMs (WADMs), the number of SADMs can be dramatically reduced. In t...