Accelerometer-based predictions of behaviour elucidate factors affecting the daily activity patterns of spotted hyenas.

Animal activity patterns are highly variable and influenced by internal and external factors, including social processes. Quantifying activity patterns in natural settings can be challenging, as it is difficult to monitor animals over long time periods. Here, we developed and validated a machine-learning-based classifier to identify behavioural states from accelerometer data of wild spotted hyenas , social carnivores that live in large fission-fusion societies.

Link updating strategies influence consensus decisions as a function of the direction of communication.

Consensus decision-making in social groups strongly depends on communication links that determine to whom individuals send, and from whom they receive, information. Here, we ask how consensus decisions are affected by strategic updating of links and how this effect varies with the direction of communication. We quantified the coevolution of link and opinion dynamics in a large population with binary opinions using mean-field numerical simulations of two voter-like models of opinion dynamics: an incoming model (IM) (where individuals choose who to receive opinions from) and an outgoing model (OM) (where individuals choose who to send opinions to).