Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus-fish hunting groups.

Collective behaviour, social interactions and leadership in animal groups are often driven by individual differences. However, most studies focus on same-species groups, in which individual variation is relatively low. Multispecies groups, however, entail interactions among highly divergent phenotypes, ranging from simple exploitative actions to complex coordinated networks.

Mapping vocal interactions in space and time differentiates signal broadcast versus signal exchange in meerkat groups.

Animal vocal communication research traditionally focuses on acoustic and contextual features of calls, yet substantial information is also contained in response selectivity and timing during vocalization events. By examining the spatiotemporal structure of vocal interactions, we can distinguish between 'broadcast' and 'exchange' signalling modes, with the former potentially serving to transmit signallers' general state and the latter reflecting more interactive signalling behaviour. Here, we tracked the movements and vocalizations of wild meerkat () groups simultaneously using collars to explore this distinction.

Sensory collectives in natural systems.

Groups of animals inhabit vastly different sensory worlds, or umwelten, which shape fundamental aspects of their behaviour. Yet the sensory ecology of species is rarely incorporated into the emerging field of collective behaviour, which studies the movements, population-level behaviours, and emergent properties of animal groups. Here, we review the contributions of sensory ecology and collective behaviour to understanding how animals move and interact within the context of their social and physical environments.

Inferring social influence in animal groups across multiple timescales.

Many animal behaviours exhibit complex temporal dynamics, suggesting there are multiple timescales at which they should be studied. However, researchers often focus on behaviours that occur over relatively restricted temporal scales, typically ones that are more accessible to human observation. The situation becomes even more complex when considering multiple animals interacting, where behavioural coupling can introduce new timescales of importance.

Disentangling influence over group speed and direction reveals multiple patterns of influence in moving meerkat groups.

Animals that travel together in groups must constantly come to consensus about both the direction and speed of movement, often simultaneously. Contributions to collective decisions may vary among group members, yet inferring who has influence over group decisions is challenging, largely due to the multifaceted nature of influence. Here we collected high-resolution GPS data from five habituated meerkat groups in their natural habitat during foraging and developed a method to quantify individual influence over both group direction and speed.

The geometry of decision-making in individuals and collectives.

Choosing among spatially distributed options is a central challenge for animals, from deciding among alternative potential food sources or refuges to choosing with whom to associate. Using an integrated theoretical and experimental approach (employing immersive virtual reality), we consider the interplay between movement and vectorial integration during decision-making regarding two, or more, options in space. In computational models of this process, we reveal the occurrence of spontaneous and abrupt "critical" transitions (associated with specific geometrical relationships) whereby organisms spontaneously switch from averaging vectorial information among, to suddenly excluding one among, the remaining options.

Collective detection based on visual information in animal groups.

We investigate key principles underlying individual, and collective, visual detection of stimuli, and how this relates to the internal structure of groups. While the individual and collective detection principles are generally applicable, we employ a model experimental system of schooling golden shiner fish () to relate theory directly to empirical data, using computational reconstruction of the visual fields of all individuals. This reveals how the external visual information available to each group member depends on the number of individuals in the group, the position within the group, and the location of the external visually detectable stimulus.

Consistent Individual Differences Drive Collective Behavior and Group Functioning of Schooling Fish.

The ubiquity of consistent inter-individual differences in behavior ("animal personalities") [1, 2] suggests that they might play a fundamental role in driving the movements and functioning of animal groups [3, 4], including their collective decision-making, foraging performance, and predator avoidance. Despite increasing evidence that highlights their importance [5-16], we still lack a unified mechanistic framework to explain and to predict how consistent inter-individual differences may drive collective behavior. Here we investigate how the structure, leadership, movement dynamics, and foraging performance of groups can emerge from inter-individual differences by high-resolution tracking of known behavioral types in free-swimming stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) shoals.