Ephemeral leadership between differently experienced birds regulates the balance between exploration and exploitation over successive homing flights in a manner that facilitates the accumulation of route innovations.

Humans supplement complex, resource-demanding strategies with simple heuristics for solving the exploration-exploitation dilemma, and noradrenaline functioning controls their utilisation.

Animals work in a world full of surprises, where using energy to position sensors proportional to the location's expected information avoids the pitfalls of positioning them at the information maxima.