Signalling in groups: New tools for the integration of animal communication and collective movement

Abstract

Investigations of collective movement and animal communication have often followed distinct, though complementary, trajectories. Both subfields are deeply concerned with how information flows between individuals and shapes subsequent behaviour. Collective movement has largely focused on the dynamics of passive, cue‐mediated group coordination, while animal communication has primarily examined the content and function of active dyadic signal exchanges in sender–receiver frameworks. However, in many social groups, network‐wide signalling and collective movement decisions are tightly linked. Here we discuss opportunities afforded by using multi‐sensor tracking tags to simultaneously monitor the fine‐scale movements and vocalisations of entire social groups. We highlight how such data can elucidate the role of vocal signals in individual and collective movement while illuminating the structures of entire vocal‐interaction sequences at previously unexamined timescales and across entire communication networks. We identify practical and analytical challenges associated with these new tools and datasets, and present avenues for addressing them. We specifically address issues associated with the deployment and synchronisation of multiple tags, the processing and interpretation of resulting multidimensional datasets, and the benefits of combining tag‐based data collection with experimental approaches. Finally, we argue that a comparative approach employing consistent methodologies across a range of environments, populations and systems is needed to shed light on the evolutionary ecology of communication and collective behaviour.

Interactive Bioacoustic Playback as a Tool for Detecting and Exploring Nonhuman Intelligence: “Conversing” with an Alaskan Humpback Whale

“…These results indicate that a greater amount of vocal synchrony was occurring during Phase 1 than during Phase 2. Vocal and behavioral synchrony are associated with pair bonding, group cohesion, and even empathy in natural communicative exchanges between humans (Wood et al, 2021;Lord et al, 2015;Imel et al, 2014;Xiao et al, 2013;Bowling et al, 2013) and between nonhuman animals (Ravignani, 2018;Greenfield et al, 2021;Patel et al, 2009;King and McGregor, 2016;Hausberger et al, 2020;Demartsev et al, 2022;Herzing, 2015), again suggesting that Twain was actively engaged in the turn-taking exchange with the broadcasted exemplar.…”

“…To avoid any bias in defining thresholds for categorizing a match, the other measure was the absolute difference in the ratio between Twain and the previous exemplar for each E-T pair as a second metric of discrepancy in latency matching. These metrics were included because such matching represents a type of behavioral synchronization, which is known to be an important feature in human and nonhuman animal communication (Wood et al, 2021; Bowling et al, 2013; Oesch, 2019; Imel et al, 2014; Lord et al, 2015; Xiao et al, 2013; Ravignani, 2018; Greenfield et al, 2021; Patel et al, 2009; King and McGregor, 2016; Hausberger et al, 2020; Demartsev et al, 2022; Herzing, 2015).…”

Rise of the machines: Integrating technology with playback experiments to study cetacean social cognition in the wild

“…However, while cetaceans have been the focus of this review, these technologies can easily be adapted for use with other taxa. Indeed, the use of drone imagery has already been used to quantify social structure in feral horses (Maeda et al, 2021), sound and movement tags have been adapted for a variety of terrestrial social mammals (see Demartsev et al, 2022, this issue), and deep learning methods offer an automated tool kit for measuring animal behaviour from videos (Graving et al, 2019). While the socioecology of a species may dictate which of these technologies is more suitable, the wider application of drones and sound and movement tags opens the door for more high‐calibre, field‐based experiments that explore animal sociality in the wild.…”

An ethical assessment of the use of old and new methods to study sociality in wild animals

“…Typically, catching animals and releasing them has enjoyed much success as a tool to study their sociality. There is a large tradition of bird ringing (Brown & Oschadleus, 2008; see Wild et al 2022), although ‘ringing’ also extends to other larger animals such as terrestrial mammals (see Demartsev et al, 2022) and marine mammals (see King & Jensen, 2022) under various forms, collectively referred to here as tagging. Tagging may here take different forms: some animals can be caught and tagged without the need for further manipulation; other must be darted and anaesthetized to allow fitting them with a collar; finally, in some types of tagging the tag literally invades their body (Soulsbury et al, 2020).…”