A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia

Copyright: \ua9 2025 Miller et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Neophobia, or aversion to novelty, is important for adaptability and survival as it influences the ways in which animals navigate risk and interact with their environments. Across individuals, species and other taxonomic levels, neophobia is known to vary considerably, but our understanding of the wider ecological drivers of neophobia is hampered by a lack of comparative multispecies studies using standardized methods. Here, we utilized the ManyBirds Project, a Big Team Science large-scale collaborative open science framework, to pool efforts and resources of 129 collaborators at 77 institutions from 24 countries worldwide across six continents. We examined both difference scores (between novel object test and control conditions) and raw data of latency to touch familiar food in the presence (test) and absence (control) of a novel object among 1,439 subjects from 136 bird species across 25 taxonomic orders incorporating lab, field, and zoo sites. We first demonstrated that consistent differences in neophobia existed among individuals, among species, and among other taxonomic levels in our dataset, rejecting the null hypothesis that neophobia is highly plastic at all taxonomic levels with no evidence for evolutionary divergence. We then tested for effects of ecological factors on neophobia, including diet, sociality, habitat, and range, while accounting for phylogeny. We found that (i) species with more specialist diets were more neophobic than those with more generalist diets, providing support for the Neophobia Threshold Hypothesis; (ii) migratory species were also more neophobic than nonmigratory species, which supports the Dangerous Niche Hypothesis. Our study shows that the evolution of avian neophobia has been shaped by ecological drivers and demonstrates the potential of Big Team Science to advance our understanding of animal behavior

A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia

Neophobia, or aversion to novelty, is important for adaptability and survival as it influences the ways in which animals navigate risk and interact with their environments. Across individuals, species and other taxonomic levels, neophobia is known to vary considerably, but our understanding of the wider ecological drivers of neophobia is hampered by a lack of comparative multispecies studies using standardized methods. Here, we utilized the ManyBirds Project, a Big Team Science large-scale collaborative open science framework, to pool efforts and resources of 129 collaborators at 77 institutions from 24 countries worldwide across six continents. We examined both difference scores (between novel object test and control conditions) and raw data of latency to touch familiar food in the presence (test) and absence (control) of a novel object among 1,439 subjects from 136 bird species across 25 taxonomic orders incorporating lab, field, and zoo sites. We first demonstrated that consistent differences in neophobia existed among individuals, among species, and among other taxonomic levels in our dataset, rejecting the null hypothesis that neophobia is highly plastic at all taxonomic levels with no evidence for evolutionary divergence. We then tested for effects of ecological factors on neophobia, including diet, sociality, habitat, and range, while accounting for phylogeny. We found that (i) species with more specialist diets were more neophobic than those with more generalist diets, providing support for the Neophobia Threshold Hypothesis; (ii) migratory species were also more neophobic than nonmigratory species, which supports the Dangerous Niche Hypothesis. Our study shows that the evolution of avian neophobia has been shaped by ecological drivers and demonstrates the potential of Big Team Science to advance our understanding of animal behavior

TAMOR a Thermal-Aware MultihOp Routing protocol for Ultrasonic Intra Body Area Networks

The rise in population aging witnesses the widespread attention towards the healthcare also by means of efficient and non invasive healthcare monitoring platforms. Intra Body Area Networks (I-BANs) are envisaged as the tool to implement this platform and will exploit the human body as the transmission medium, causing undesirable overheating of tissues and organs crossed by electromagnetic signals carrying information. To cope with this issue, at the physical level, it has been recently proposed to use ultrasonic waves for I-BAN applications [1– 4] both to improve the transmission performance constrained in case of RF waves by the composition of the body (more than 65% composed of water, a mean through which electromagnetic waves scarcely propagate leading to very high attenuation) and for the purpose of avoiding temperature rise in proximity of organic tissues. In parallel with this trend, thermal aware routing was proposed for On Body Area Networks where electromagnetic waves propagate on the surface of the body. In this poster we try to combine the advantages of both approaches. In fact, on the one hand we propose to use ultrasonic waves at the physical level; on the other hand, at the network level, we introduce a thermal-aware routing protocol which allows to balance tissues overheating in IBAN. Moreover, we have started an experimental activity to implement the thermal-aware routing protocol in a real testbed [2] along with the overall protocol stack needed for testing

An Experimental Testbed for Managing BAN Services at the Network Edge

In this article we investigate how to support Intraor On-Body Area Network (BAN) applications with strict delay requirements using a network edge architecture. By using an SDN/NFV approach integrated with a mobile system it is possible to transmit a multimedia stream generated inside the human body to a mobile device, which then relays the information to the cloud for further processing. Therefore, we propose an edge approach to reduce overheads, thus making the support of time-constrained medical applications feasible. The proposed architecture has been implemented in a real testbed and the performance of the system were assessed to prove its feasibility

Molecular and cellular basis of scleroderma

Systemic sclerosis (scleroderma) is a chronic inflammatory disease that leads to fibrosis of the skin and involved internal organs. No efficient therapy is currently available. This review summarizes recent progress made in basic as well as clinical science and concludes with a concept that therapy targeting fibrosis in scleroderma needs to take into account the global microenvironment in the skin with its diverse cellular players interacting with a complex extracellular matrix environment and matrix-associated growth factors