Journal of Zoology Podcasts

In this episode, we are told how predators by just their presence are able to affect the behaviour of their prey, we will hear about a particular case of bat pollination in New Zealand, and we learn what mechanisms migratory birds are using to navigate the globe in so-called ‘true navigation’.

In this episode, we will hear about how the behaviour of extinct animals like dinosaurs can be deduced from fossils, we learn how parasites manipulate the behaviour of their hosts, and we are told about new findings on cheetah cub mortality and their effect on conservation planning for cheetahs.

In this episode, reproductive division of labour in eusocial species and how it emerged spontaneously in harvester ant queens, how the ecology of extinct sabretooth predators could be studied by looking at their living analogue such as the southern short-tailed opossum, and a field experiment comparing the effectiveness of two anti-predator strategies, crypsis and aposematism, using artificial prey.

In this episode, we will hear about the African ice rat and its changeable behaviour towards fellow colony members, learn what ‘aggressive mimicry’ is and how it could help us better understand the animal mind. We are also told about how king penguins optimize their diving behaviour for efficient foraging, and how animals learn from each other even when they are members of different species.

IIn this episode, we will learn about tiger occupancy surveys for tiger conservation, how lion predation on giraffes can be studied by surveying for claw marks on live giraffes, we will hear about a sumo-wrestling frog that uses spines projecting from their hands in combat and mating, and about the production and the functions of blue colouration in animals.

In this episode, we learn how prey adjust their anti-predator defences to variable levels of predation risk, whether vocalisations could be used as indicators of animal emotions, we’ll track leopards by GPS for modelling their predation behaviour, and we will hear about a bug that calls its offspring to feed..

In this episode, we hear about analyzing the structure of a bird song and how the blue throat patch of European green lizards signals male quality, and we learn about the habitat and resource use of spider monkeys in Costa Rica, and grazing ungulates in the African savannah.

Predicting the feeding behaviour of an extinct bear and investigating moonlight foraging in African wild-dogs.

A carnivore themed episode, we investigate social and spatial organization of the black-backed jackal, find out more about the prey preferences of the Sumatran tiger, and the Asiatic lion, and we tease apart predator-prey interactions with two anuran tadpole species.

Editorial board member, Rob Williams talks to us about the recent Zoological Society of London symposium, Marine Protected Areas on the high seas and discusses his January Editorial.