A well-developed spatial memory is important for many animals, but appears especially important for scatter-hoarding species. Consequently, the scatter-hoarding system provides an excellent paradigm in which to study the integrative aspects of memory use within an ecological and evolutionary framework. One of the main tenets of this paradigm is that selection for enhanced spatial memory for cac...

Animal hoarding is a poorly understood, maladaptive, destructive behavior whose etiology and pathology are only beginning to emerge. We compare and contrast animal hoarding to the compulsive hoarding of objects and proceed to draw upon attachment theory, the literature of personality disorder and trauma, and our own clinical experience to propose a developmental trajectory. Throughout life, the...

Scatter hoarding by corvids (crows, jays, magpies, and nutcrackers) provides seed dispersal for many large-seeded plants, including oaks and pines. When hoarding seeds, corvids often choose nonrandom locations throughout the landscape, resulting in differential survival of seeds. In the context of habitat restoration, such disproportional storing of seeds in areas suitable for germination and e...

The study of ingestive behaviour has an extensive history, starting as early as 1918 when Wallace Craig, an animal behaviourist, coined the terms 'appetitive' and 'consummatory' for the two-part sequence of eating, drinking and sexual behaviours. Since then, most ingestive behaviour research has focused on the neuroendocrine control of food ingestion (consummatory behaviour). The quantity of fo...

Social interactions pervade all aspects of life in the social insects. Networks of interacting nestmates enable the maintenance of colony homeostasis and regulation of brood development. Artificial colony-level selection on the amount of pollen stored in honeybee colonies has produced high- and low-pollen-hoarding strains that have been used as a model system to study the genetic and physiologi...