Lucy Farrow

University of New England | UNE · Department of Zoology

True individual recognition refers to an animal's ability to recognise at least one unique feature of another individual. Demonstrating this in animals equivocally can be difficult, as it requires confounding variables such as location, kinship or familiarity to be carefully controlled. This is problematic, as a poor understanding of how individual...

Background Recent anthropomorphic disturbances are occurring at an increasing rate leading to organisms facing a variety of challenges. This change is testing the information processing capacity (IPC) of all animals. Brain function is widely accepted to be influenced by a variety of factors, including relative size, number of neurons and neuronal d...

From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to recognize individuals provides great selective advantages, such as avoiding inbreeding depression during breeding. Whilst the capacity to recognize individuals for these types of benefits is well established in social contexts, why this recognition might arise in a potentially deadly alarm-calling co...

Although functionally referential signals have been extensively studied, largely in mammals (e.g., nonhuman primates, see Cheney and Seyfarth (1988); mongooses, see Manser et al. (2002); and other ground-dwelling species, see Blumstein and Armitage (1997), other social taxa such as birds would similarly benefit from the use of referential signals....