Caterina Funghi

Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) | ISPRA · Department of Wildlife

In social living animals, individuals typically use two main strategies to find food: either by exploiting social information (scrounger) or relying on personal knowledge (producer). These tactics are often linked to different life-history strategies. Access to foraging patches in hierarchical social groups may constrain the use of the producer-scr...

Background In arid environments, plant primary productivity is generally low and highly variable both spatially and temporally. Resources are not evenly distributed in space and time (e.g., soil nutrients, water), and depend on global (El Niño/ Southern Oscillation) and local climate parameters. The launch of the Sentinel2-satellite, part of the Eu...

Early-life experience can fundamentally shape individual life-history trajectories. Previous research has suggested that exposure to stress during development causes differences in social behaviour later in life. In captivity, juvenile zebra finches exposed to elevated corticosterone levels were less socially choosy and more central in their social...

Understanding how heatwaves affect organisms is becoming an important issue in animal behaviour, given the changing climate. Exposure to high air temperatures can lead to lethal hyperthermia, when individuals are no longer able to maintain body temperature within their optimal physiological range. Animals will rapidly adjust their behaviour, priori...

Sex differences in animal ornamentation are thought largely genetically fixed due to stronger sexual selection on males of species with conventional sex roles. But, other types of sex differences are not genetically fixed. For example, several differences in human social behavior result instead from sociocultural or economic constraints on women. S...

Sexual traits (e.g., visual ornaments, acoustic signals, courtship behaviour) are often displayed together as multi-modal signals. Some hypotheses predict joint evolution of different sexual signals (e.g., to increase the efficiency of communication), or that different signals trade-off with each other (e.g., due to limited resources). Alternativel...

In gregarious animals, social interactions frequently take the form of dominance hierarchies that maintain stable relationships between individuals, and settle disputes without extra costs. Traits that function as signals of status can play an important role in mediating interactions among individuals, both in social and in sexual contexts. Caroten...

Sexual signals can comprise traits with multiple functions, and species with extreme phenotypes offer an opportunity to link function with signal evolution. This is the case in the serin Serinus serinus, a songbird with extremely fast syllable rate compared to related finches, and high sound frequency for its body size. Previous work on receiver re...

The recent growth of research on animal personality could provide new insights into our understanding of sociality and the structure of animal groups. Although simple assays of the type commonly used to study animal personality have been shown to correlate with social aggressiveness in some bird species, conflicting empirical results do not yet mak...

Selection due to social interactions comprises competition over matings (sexual selection stricto sensu) plus other forms of social competition and cooperation. Sexual selection explains sex differences in ornamentation and in various other phenotypes, but does not easily explain cases where those phenotypes are similar in males and females. Unders...

Behavioral differences among individuals are common and are organized into personalities in a wide variety of species. Hypotheses for the coexistence of behavioral differences fall into 3 categories: variation in selection, frequency-dependent selection, and behavioral plasticity. We tested predictions of those hypotheses regarding geographic covar...