Together with Dr. Vedrana Šlipogor, I guest-edited a Special Column in Current Zoology on the topic “Behavioural Flexibility and Novel Environments”
And it’s finally out! Check out the wonderful contributions and our Editorial here: https://academic.oup.com/cz/article/70/3/304/7686939
This Special Column brings together different pieces of research that investigate the role of behavioral flexibility, in its broadest sense, when facing novel environments. In our introduction to the topical collection we clarify our operational definitions of environmental novelty and behavioral flexibility, and place the empirical contributions in context.
The 10 articles that make up this Special Column collection highlight the role of behavioural flexibility in:
- dispersing into novel environments;
- coping with human-altered, native, and non-native “natural” environments;
- the interplay with consistent inter-individual behavioral variation.
We aimed to provide a framework to integrate behavioral ecology and comparative cognition perspectives for future studies. By summarizing the contributions to the topical collection, we aimed to extract and integrate the main lessons that could be learned from the most recent work in this field.
We draw attention to the taxonomic breadth of species highlighted in this Special Column, which range from invertebrates to non-human primates, as well as to the range of habitats these species live in, from captive, through anthropogenic, to native and non-native “natural” habitats. Furthermore, this Special Column highlights scientific efforts from multidisciplinary international teams across the globe. We hope that this Special Column will stimulate further discussions on the topic of behavioral flexibility and novel environments, and potentially lead to new big-scale collaboration projects, in line with the Big Team Science efforts. We also hope that this topical collection will help readers in designing new studies, whether conceptual or empirical in nature, allowing further insights into the role of behavior and cognition, and their potential for flexibility, in facing novel environments.
