Catch the wave: prairie dogs assess neighbours’ awareness using contagious displays

Abstract

The jump-yip display of black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) is contagious, spreading through a prairie dog town as 'the wave' through a stadium. Because contagious communication in primates serves to assess conspecific social awareness, we investigated whether instigators of jumpyip bouts adjusted their behaviour relative to the response of conspecifics recruited to display bouts. Increased responsiveness of neighbouring town members resulted in bout initiators devoting a significantly greater proportion of time to active foraging. Contagious jump-yips thus function to assess neighbours' alertness, soliciting social information to assess effective conspecific group size in real time and reveal active probing of conspecific awareness consistent with theory of mind in these group-living rodents.

Spreading Information in a Network of Interacting Neighbours

“…More recently, Kastberger and co-workers [28], described collective defence behaviour in giant honeybees ( Apis dorsata ): generator bees in the centre of the nest raise their abdomen and their nest mates around follow them in sequential order, which creates a kind of Mexican wave spreading within the hive. A similar, Mexican-wave behavioural pattern, was found among signalling black-tailed prairie dogs ( Cynomys ludovicianus ) in assessing collective vigilance of their colony members [19]. It might be argued, that the difference between gregarious and territorial species in the potential for the "globalization" of behaviour, might be purely quantitative: in the former each individual can observe many conspecifics, whereas in the latter, information about their behaviour is limited to a few immediate neighbours, as a result of dispersal.…”

Sentinel dominance status influences forager use of social information

“…Speaker height was the same throughout experimental trials, so foragers could not have been 377 responding to differences in height at the time of playback, but they may associate dominant groupmates (Pays et al 2010), but it has become increasingly apparent that foragers also make 397 use of vocal information (Radford and Ridley 2007;Hare et al 2014). A growing body of 398 evidence over recent years has highlighted the importance of vocal cues in sentinel systems 399 (Manser 1999;Hollén et al 2008;Bell et al 2009;2010;Radford et al 2009Radford et al , 2011 (Conradt and List 2009;Boeckle et al 2012;Micheletta et al 2012).…”

How Approaches to Animal Swarm Intelligence Can Improve the Study of Collective Intelligence in Human Teams

“…This level of detail is important because many social behaviors involve dynamic interactions between individuals over time. For example, many behaviors are socially contagious (Giganti and Zilli 2011;Hare et al 2014;Reby et al 1999). By provoking similar behavior in adjacent individuals, a display by one or a few individuals can rapidly propagate throughout an entire group.…”