Related papers: A complex social structure with fission-fusion pro…
Collectives are often able to process information in a distributed fashion, surpassing each individual member's processing capacity. In fission-fusion dynamics, where group members come together and split from others often, sharing…
Social foraging is a widespread form of animal foraging in which groups of individuals coordinate their decisions to exploit resources in the environment. Animals show a variety of social structures from egalitarian to hierarchical. In this…
Many animal groups are heterogeneous and may even consist of individuals of different species, called mixed-species flocks. Mathematical and computational models of collective animal movement behaviour, however, typically assume that groups…
Foraging is a widespread behavior, and being part of a group may bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Often theoretical models of collective…
Interactions in natural communities can be highly heterogeneous, with any given species interacting appreciably with only some of the others, a situation commonly represented by sparse interaction networks. We study the consequences of…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
Animals typically forage in groups. Social foraging can help animals avoid predation and decrease their uncertainty about the richness of food resources. Despite this, theoretical mechanistic models of patch foraging have overwhelmingly…
Local interactions, when individuals meet, can regulate collective behavior. In a system without any central control, the rate of interaction may depend simply on how the individuals move around. But interactions could in turn influence…
We discuss various features of the trajectories of spider monkeys looking for food in a tropical forest, as observed recently in an extensive {\it in situ} study. Some of the features observed can be interpreted as the result of social…
We introduce a model of traveling agents ({\it e.g.} frugivorous animals) who feed on randomly located vegetation patches and disperse their seeds, thus modifying the spatial distribution of resources in the long term. It is assumed that…
Scale-free foraging patterns are widespread among animals. These may be the outcome of an optimal searching strategy to find scarce randomly distributed resources, but a less explored alternative is that this behaviour may result from the…
How do landscape fragmentation affects ecosystems diversity and stability is an important and complex question in ecology with no simple answer, as spatially separated habitats where species live are highly dynamic rather than just static.…
In this paper we address the problem of inferring social structure and dominance relationships in a group of rhesus macaques (a species of monkey) using only position data captured using RFID tags. Automatic inference of the social…
Computational models of collective behavior in birds has allowed us to infer interaction rules directly from experimental data. Using a generic form of these rules we explore the collective behavior and emergent dynamics of a simulated…
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Social animals self-organise to create groups to increase protection against predators and productivity. One-to-one interactions are the building blocks of these emergent social structures and may correspond to friendship, grooming,…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…