Maëlan Tomasek

• Doctor of Veterinary Medicine
• PhD Student at University of Clermont Auvergne

Three main mechanisms have been proposed to explain divergent decisions between species faced with the same options: differences in sensory abilities, attentional capacities, or cognitive evaluations. While these mechanisms have been well-established in controlled settings, there is limited empirical evidence regarding the ways in which different s...

The social intelligence hypothesis posits that animals living in more complex social groups display better cognitive performances. However, this hypothesis has mainly been investigated in primates and studies using similar paradigms across different species are scarce. We tested three species of wild Lamprologine shell-dwelling cichlids from Lake T...

Many animal species have been shown to discriminate between individual humans in captive settings and may use a variety of cues to do so. Empirical evidence remains scarce for animals in the wild, however, particularly in aquatic contexts. For the first time, we investigated discrimination of individual humans by fish in the wild. We first trained...

A central challenge in understanding the evolution of cognition is the ability to compare a set of species differing in a trait of interest while being ecologically and phylogenetically close. Here, we examine whether differences in bower‐building flexibility are related to differences in cognitive flexibility between two Tanganyikan cichlids. Cogn...

Cognitive flexibility, the ability to modify one's decision rules to adapt to a new situation, has been extensively studied in many species. In fish, though, data on cognitive flexibility are scarce, especially in the wild. We studied a lekking species of cichlid fish in Lake Tanganyika, Aulonocranus dewindti. Males create sand bowers as spawning s...

The ability to control one's vocal production is a major advantage in acoustic communication. Yet, not all species have the same level of control over their vocal output. Several bird species can interrupt their song upon hearing an external stimulus, but there is no evidence how flexible this behavior is. Most research on corvids focuses on their...