What are leaders made of? The role of individual experience in determining leader–follower relations in homing pigeons

Flack, Andrea; Pettit, Benjamin; Freeman, Robin; Guilford, Tim; Biro, Dora

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.12.018

Cited by 99 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Even though solo training did improve birds' solo homing efficiency, their advantage over the rest of the flock remained small or was only temporal. This interpretation is in agreement with past results showing that birds with more experience will more clearly emerge as leaders when the difference in experience between them and their flight partners is large (Flack et al 2012).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Robustness of flight leadership relations in pigeons

et al. 2013

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Collective animal movements produce spectacular natural phenomena that arise from simple local interactions among group members. Flocks of homing pigeons, Columba livia, provide a useful model for the study of collective motion and decision making. During homing flights, flock members are forced to resolve potentially divergent navigational preferences in order to stay together and benefit from flying in a group. Recent work has demonstrated that some individuals consistently contribute more to the movement decisions of the flock than others do, thereby generating stable hierarchical leader/follower networks. Yet, what attributes of a flying pigeon reliably predict leadership remains an open question. We examined the flexibility of an individual's hierarchical leadership rank (i.e. its ordinal position when flock members are ranked according to the average time differences with which they lead or follow others) as a function of changes in its navigational knowledge. We manipulated already established hierarchical networks in three different flocks, by providing certain individuals with additional homing experience. We found that such training did not consistently lead to an increase in birds' leadership ranks, and that, in general, the nature of leader/follower interactions between trained and untrained birds remained unaffected. Thus, leadership hierarchies in pigeon flocks appear resistant to changes in the navigational knowledge of a subset of their members, at least when these changes are relatively small. We discuss the implications of our results in light of the potential benefits of structural stability in decision-making networks

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Robustness of flight leadership relations in pigeons

et al. 2013

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“…Instead, in the case of pigeon flocks, the emergence of leadership and dominance hierarchies are each affected by different factors. By ignoring social dominance when in flight, flocks of pigeons potentially make better navigational decisions because leadership can emerge from relevant attributes, such as local experience and route fidelity (27,28). In despotically organized societies of mosquitofish and meerkats, it has also been observed that the dominant individual is not necessarily the leader (18, 29); however, in neither of these cases were dominance relationships quantified as multilevel networks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context-dependent hierarchies in pigeons

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Vásárhelyi

Pettit

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Hierarchical organization is widespread in the societies of humans and other animals, both in social structure and in decision-making contexts. In the case of collective motion, the majority of case studies report that dominant individuals lead group movements, in agreement with the common conflation of the terms "dominance" and "leadership." From a theoretical perspective, if social relationships influence interactions during collective motion, then social structure could also affect leadership in large, swarm-like groups, such as fish shoals and bird flocks. Here we use computer-vision-based methods and miniature GPS tracking to study, respectively, social dominance and in-flight leader-follower relations in pigeons. In both types of behavior we find hierarchically structured networks of directed interactions. However, instead of being conflated, dominance and leadership hierarchies are completely independent of each other. Although dominance is an important aspect of variation among pigeons, correlated with aggression and access to food, our results imply that the stable leadership hierarchies in the air must be based on a different set of individual competences. In addition to confirming the existence of independent and context-specific hierarchies in pigeons, we succeed in setting out a robust, scalable method for the automated analysis of dominance relationships, and thus of social structure, applicable to many species. Our results, as well as our methods, will help to incorporate the broader context of animal social organization into the study of collective behavior.collective animal behavior | hierarchy | high-throughput ethology | leadership | dominance network F or a group of humans or nonhuman animals, networks can be constructed from a number of different types of interaction and across a range of contexts, including association, aggression, courtship, and leadership (1-4). This aspect of interaction networks raises the question as to whether network structure is maintained across contexts because of stable relationships or underlying individual differences, or whether network structure reorganizes in every new situation, where the same individuals may have different competences. For example, does social dominance routinely endow individuals with leadership roles within the group? By leadership, we refer to an individual's degree of influence over a group's decision: in the case of collective travel, this largely concerns the timing or direction of the group's movements (5). Dominance signifies the consistent winning of agonistic interactions (6). Most studies of the relationship between leadership and social structure have focused on mammals, especially primates. In species with highly asymmetrical dominance relationships, such as gray wolves (7), mountain gorillas (8), and chacma baboons (9), there is a consistent trend for dominants to lead. This effect may be mediated by factors other than dominance, such as the central position of dominants in the association network (10) or their greater metabo...

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“…Theo retical work predicts that collective migratory strategies might evolve under a wide range of eco logical scenarios (Torney et al 2009(Torney et al , 2010Guttal and Couzin 2010;Shaw and Couzin 2013), and it may be no coincidence that migrations and other navigational feats are often undertaken by large groups (Beauchamp 2011;Milner Gulland et al 2011). Homing pigeons return more efficiently when released as groups than they do as individu als (Biro et al 2006;Dell'Ariccia et al 2008), and birds with less information can benefit from fol lowing others (Flack et al 2012). Theories, like (unpublished data)…”

Section: Collective Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

A collective navigation hypothesis for homeward migration in anadromous salmonids

et al. 2014

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Anadromous salmon (genera Oncorhynchus and Salmo) spend much of their lives feeding in productive northern oceans and then return home to natal sites for reproduction with remarkable accuracy. The mechanisms used for navigation by individuals during migrations are thought to include geomagnetic, celestial and olfactory cues, but rarely are social interactions between individuals considered. Mounting evidence from other taxa indicates that individuals in larger groups can better sense and respond to environmental cues, thus potentially increasing their ability to navigate. Here, we propose that salmon might similarly benefit from col lective navigation on their homeward journey. To explore this, we compiled data from multiple studies and found strong evidence that rates of successful homing increase with population abundance, consistent with collective navigation. We then discuss how collective navigation could benefit salmon during each stage of their seaward and homeward migrations, and complement this with a review of salmon sociality. Next, we analyse historic high seas catch records and provide new insight into schooling structure of salmon in the marine environment. We argue that collective navigation likely represents a presently under appreciated Fish and Fisheries ; 17 (2016), 2. -S. 525-542 https://dx.doi.org/10.1111 mechanism enhancing the navigational ability of salmon as well as other migra tory species, and outline critical tests of our hypothesis.

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What are leaders made of? The role of individual experience in determining leader–follower relations in homing pigeons

Cited by 99 publications

References 24 publications

Robustness of flight leadership relations in pigeons

Robustness of flight leadership relations in pigeons

Context-dependent hierarchies in pigeons

A collective navigation hypothesis for homeward migration in anadromous salmonids

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