The Brain Behind the Pack
If you've ever watched African wild dogs hunt, you know they move like a single organism — flanking, feinting, closing in with an eerie, coordinated precision that looks almost choreographed. Turns out, the brain circuitry behind that coordination just got a very close look. A team of researchers led by Samson Chengetanai, alongside Adhil Bhagwandin, Mads Bertelsen, Therese Hård, Patrick Hof, Muhammad Spocter, and Paul Manger, has published the sixth installment in an ongoing project to map the entire brain of Lycaon pictus — the African wild dog — piece by piece. This latest paper, published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology , zeroes in on the motor system: the neural machinery responsible for everything from a full sprint to the surprisingly delicate business of a face-lick between packmates. Using cyto-, myelo-, and chemoarchitectural staining (essentially, a suite of techniques that let researchers see the structure and chemical signatures of brain tissue ...
