Sensory collectives in natural systems
- Department of Migration, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany
- Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Germany
- Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, Germany
- Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany
- Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Germany
- Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany
- Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, United States
- Max Planck Research Group Predators and Toxic Prey, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Germany
- Advanced Science Research Center and Program in Psychology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, United States
- Department of Anthropology, New York University, United States
- Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, Canada
- Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary, Canada
Figures
Figure 1
A framework for the study of sensory collectives.
This schematic highlights the feedback between the sensory stimuli experienced by animals and their behavioural states. The arrows represent the different types of stimuli experienced by the prey animal—harmless and potentially harmful heterospecifics (purple and beige, respectively), social conspecifics (orange), and the physical environment (grey). The animal’s selective perception of the stimuli by filtering, amplification, or reduction creates an umwelt, the response to which determines the animal’s future behavioural state. In this specific example, the sensory system of the foraging blackbuck prevents the detection of echolocation calls of a bat, amplifies predator cues from a wolf, filters out cues from the physical environment, and attends fully to conspecific cues to form its personal umwelt. The integration of these cues leads to a probabilistic change in the behaviour of the individual, which in turn feeds back into the sensory systems of other conspecifics.
Box 3—figure 1
Adult zebrafish always travel in groups, whether in nature or in captive settings.
Photo credit: Delia S. Shelton.
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Sensory collectives in natural systems
eLife 12:e88028.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.88028
