Stress in the social environment: behavioural and social consequences of stress transmission in bird flocks.

The stress response helps individuals cope with challenges, yet how individual stress levels shape group-level processes and the behaviour of other group members has rarely been explored. In social groups, stress responses can be buffered by others or transmitted to members that have not even experienced the stressor first-hand. Stress transmission, in particular, can have profound consequences for the dynamics of social groups and the fitness of individuals therein.

Expanding theory, methodology and empirical systems at the spatial-social interface.

All animals exhibit some combination of spatial and social behaviours. A diversity of interactions occurs between such behaviours, producing emergent phenomena at . Untangling and interrogating these complex, intertwined processes can be vital for identifying the mechanisms, causes and consequences of behavioural variation in animal ecology.

The contribution of movement to social network structure and spreading dynamics under simple and complex transmission.

The structure of social networks fundamentally influences spreading dynamics. In general, the more contact between individuals, the more opportunity there is for the transmission of information or disease to take place. Yet, contact between individuals, and any resulting transmission events, are determined by a combination of spatial (where individuals choose to move) and social rules (who they choose to interact with or learn from).

Collective intelligence facilitates emergent resource partitioning through frequency-dependent learning.

Deciding where to forage must not only account for variations in habitat quality but also where others might forage. Recent studies have suggested that when individuals remember recent foraging outcomes, negative frequency-dependent learning can allow them to avoid resources exploited by others (indirect competition). This process can drive the emergence of consistent differences in resource use (resource partitioning) at the population level.

Testing the information centre hypothesis in a multilevel society.

In various animal species conspecifics aggregate at sleeping sites. Such aggregations can act as information centres where individuals acquire up-to-date knowledge about their environment. In some species, communal sleeping sites comprise individuals from multiple groups, where each group maintains stable membership over time.