Nora V Carlson

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Victoria

Anthropogenic noise is a pervasive environmental pollutant that continues to expand and increase globally, especially in marine environments, affecting many marine animals, especially fish. Although interest and concern regarding the effects of noise on fish has increased, most studies still focus on the effects noise has on individual species, oft...

Cooperative behaviour is widespread in animals and is likely to be the result of multiple selective pressures. A contentious hypothesis is that helping enhances the probability of obtaining a sexual partner (i.e., confers direct benefits through sexual selection). Under this hypothesis, cooperative behaviours may have evolved into a signal. Consequ...

The SMART-BARN (scalable multimodal arena for real-time tracking behavior of animals in large numbers) achieves fast, robust acquisition of movement, behavior, communication, and interactions of animals in groups, within a large (14.7 meters by 6.6 meters by 3.8 meters), three-dimensional environment using multiple information channels. Behavior is...

Dominance interactions and hierarchies are of long-standing interest in the field of animal behaviour. Currently, dominance hierarchies are viewed as complex social structures formed by repeated interactions between individuals. Most studies on this phenomenon come from single-species groups. However, animals are constantly surrounded by and intera...

Mixed-species groups of birds, fishes and mammals have traditionally been described in taxa-specific journals. However, mixed-species systems are actually more widely found when one includes aggregative (non-moving) systems, such as those common in amphibians and invertebrates. The objective of this special issue is to dispel the idea that mixed-sp...

Anthropogenic noise is a major pollutant in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Since the industrial revolution, human activities have become increasingly noisy, leading to both acute and chronic disturbance of a wide variety of animals. Chronic noise exposure can affect animals over their lifespan, leading to changes in species interactions and li...

Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by it, warn others, and communicate about the predator's threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of mobbing have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still k...

Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by predators, warn others, and communicate about the predator’s threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of it have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still...

Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by predators, warn others, and communicate about the predator’s threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of it have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still...

Synopsis Communication is a social process and usually occurs in a network of signalers and receivers. While social network analysis has received enormous recent attention from animal behaviorists, there have been relatively few attempts to apply these techniques to communication networks. Communication networks have the potential to offer novel in...

Individual vocal recognition (IVR) has been well studied in mammals and birds. These studies have primarily delved into understanding IVR in specific limited contexts (e.g. parent–offspring and mate recognition) where individuals discriminate one individual from all others. However, little research has examined IVR in more socially demanding circum...

Mobbing is an anti-predator behavior where multiple species collectively harass a predator while vocalizing. These flocks are made up of species whose vocalizations contain information about predator threat (information sources), and those that eavesdrop on this information (scroungers). To be a community informant (a key information source), a spe...

Animal alarm calls can contain detailed information about a predator's threat, and hetero-specific eavesdropping on these signals creates vast communication networks. While eavesdropping is common, this indirect public information is often less reliable than direct predator observations. Red-breasted nuthatches (Sitta canadensis) eavesdrop on chick...

Mobbing, where birds harass a predator through a combination of vocalizations and stereotyped behaviours, is an effective anti‐predator behaviour for many species. Mobbing may be particularly important for juveniles, as these individuals are often more vulnerable than are adults. Although the component behaviours of mobbing are often considered to...

Carlson and colleagues introduce mobbing an anti-predator behaviour found in many animals.

Acoustic localization has been used to track numerous vocalizing animals, including whales, bats birds by measuring the time of arrival differences of a sound recorded by multiple receivers. This method, however, requires the species of interest to vocalize regularly to achieve decent temporal resolution. In order to track the movements of birds th...

Many animals alter their anti-predator behavior in accordance to the threat level of a predator. While much research has examined variation in mobbing responses to different predators, few studies have investigated how anti-predator behavior is affected by changes in a predator’s own state or behavior. We examined the effect of sparrowhawk (Accipit...

To combat the threat of predation, prey species have developed a variety of ways to recognize and respond appropriately to novel predators. While there is evidence that predator recognition does not require learning in certain species, learning appears to play an important role for other species. In systems where learning is important, it is less c...

Many species use antipredator vocalizations to signal information about potential predators, including the level of threat posed by a particular predator. It is not clear, however, why only some prey species do this. Because they use multiple mechanisms to encode threat-specific information about predators, North American Paridae species have been...