Citation: Senar JC, Garamszegi LZ, Tilgar V, Biard C, Moreno-Rueda G, Salmón P, Rivas JM, Sprau P, Dingemanse NJ, Charmantier A, Demeyrier V, Navalpotro H and Isaksson C (2017) Urban Great Tits (Parus major) Show Higher Distress Calling and Pecking Rates than Rural Birds across Europe. Front. Ecol. Evol. 5:163. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2017.00163 Urban Great Tits (Parus major) Show Higher Distress Cal...

The static trade-off and pecking order capital structure theories are analyzed and applied to nonprofit organizations. In addition, this paper also considers how nonprofits adjust their leverage over time. The analyses consider the unique role of donor-restricted endowments in the decision to borrow, as well as different types of borrowing by nonprofits. The results indicate that nonprofit capi...

Feather pecking is a problem in commercial laying hens, particularly in loose-housing systems, where many hens can be affected by only a few feather peckers. In addition, feather pecking can become an even larger problem if it spreads throughout the flock. There are several possible ways that feather pecking may spread. The simplest way is that one hen may damage the feathers of a hen, and anot...

Six experiments were used to examine the effects of explicit response, stimulus, and temporal dependencies on responding in an interfood interval. The first two experiments demonstrated that 10-segment 60-s interfood clocks controlled similar distributions of key pecking in pigeons regardless of whether response-reinforcement contiguity was required, allowed, or precluded. The third and fourth ...

The time budgets, behavior rhythms, foraging habitats and food preferences of oriental white stork Ciconia boyciana were studied from December 2013 to March 2014 with instantaneous scan sampling and focus animal sampling methods at Poyang Lake, Jiangxi province, China. The results showed that the main behavior of oriental white stork were resting (40.07±3.21%) and foraging (35.44±2.42%), follow...

Chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) learn to peck soon after hatching and then peck in rapid bursts or bouts with intervals of non-pecking activity. The food sources may be static such as seeds and chick crumb, or mobile such as a mealworm. Here, changes with age in pecking toward chick crumb and a mealworm were measured. Chicks were reared in pairs and their pecking of crumb food was video recor...

Spatial variation in lighting environments frequently leads to population variation in colour patterns, colour preferences and visual systems. Yet lighting conditions also vary diurnally, and many aspects of visual systems and behaviour vary over this time scale. Here, we use the bluefin killifish (Lucania goodei) to compare how diurnal variation and habitat variation (clear versus tannin-stain...

Today the developments in genetics are exciting. Perhaps this explains why geneticists sometimes seem to overlook common sense solutions. One example of this is the selection experiment done by Bijma et al. (2007a,b). These authors developed a sophisticated statistical method of group selection against mortality in hens randomly placed together. One may safely assume that this mortality is due ...

Pigeons were given a small, immediate food reinforcement for pecking a key, and a larger, delayed reinforcement for not pecking this key. Most subjects pecked the key on more than 95% of trials. However, when pecking a differently colored key at an earlier time prevented this option from becoming available, three of 10 subjects consistently pecked it, thereby forcing themselves to wait for the ...