Group hunting within the Carnivora: physiological, cognitive and environmental influences on strategy and cooperation

Abstract

Cooperative hunting is believed to have important implications for the evolution of sociality and advanced cognitive abilities. Variation in the level of hunt organisation amongst species and how their cognitive, behavioural and athletic adaptations may contribute to observed patterns of cooperative hunting behaviour, however, are poorly understood. We, therefore, reviewed the literature for evidence of different levels of hunt organisation and cooperation in carnivorans and examined their social and physical adaptations for hunting. Descriptions of group hunting were scarce for many species and often of insufficient detail for us to be able to classify the level of hunt organisation involved. However, despite this, reports of behaviour fitting the description of collaboration, the most advanced level of hunt organisation, were found in over half the carnivorans reported to hunt cooperatively. There was no evidence that this behaviour would require advanced cognitive abilities. However, there was some evidence that both social mechanisms reducing aggression between group members and information transfer amongst individuals may aid cooperative hunting. In general, the cooperative strategies used seemed to depend partly on the species' locomotor abilities and habitat. There was some evidence that individuals take on consistent roles during cooperative hunts in some species, but it was not clear if this reflects individuals' physical differences, social factors or life experiences. Better understanding of the social, cognitive and physical mechanisms underlying cooperative hunting, and indeed establishing to what degree it exists in the first instance, will require more data for multiple individuals and species over many hunts.

Coordinated hunting by Cuban boas

“…Coordinated hunting, in which individual predators relate in time and space to each other's actions, is uncommon but widespread in animals (Bailey, Myatt, & Wilson, 2012). Among vertebrates, coordinated hunting is presently known with certainty in hominid primates (Boesch & Boesch, 1989;Stiner, Barkai, & Gopher, 2009), a few carnivores (Bailey et al, 2012;Creel & Creel, 1995;Eaton, 2009;Mech, 2007;Stander, 1992), cetaceans (Gazda, Connor, Edgar, & Cox, 2005;Smith, Siniff, Reichle, & Stone, 1981), two species of raptors (Bednarz, 1988;Leonardi, 1999), two species of corvids (Bowman, 2003;Yosef & Yosef, 2010), a few species of fish (Bshary, Hohner, Ait-El-Djoudi, & Fricke, 2006;Herbert-Read et al, 2016;Lönnstedt, Ferrari, & Chivers, 2014), crocodilians (Dinets, 2015), and monitor lizards (James & Fox, 2007;Pitman, 1931).…”

Group size, individual role differentiation and effectiveness of cooperation in a homogeneous group of hunters

“…Furthermore, the emergence of individual role differentiation in our model shows that social structures reported from hunting scenes might be mere artefact of spatial dynamics. Our results could be relevant for a wide range of disciplines, from ecology to animal behaviour (for the implications for cognition and social structures [3]), swarm robotics (troop and cooperative formations of homogeneous agents with decentralized decisions and minor communication) and statistical physics (stability and morphology of organization of asymmetric self-propelled particle systems [21]). …”

“…In fact, we assume that the unique one-to-one interaction between wolves is of the repulsive kind: when wolves are at a distance d a from the prey, wolves move away from each other. This shortrange repulsion is due to the need of individual space (see Hediger 1950 in [14]), collision avoidance, to have a better visibility of the prey [3] and, when close to the prey, to leave space to move freely in response to possible attacks from the prey.…”

Spatial organization, grouping strategies and cyclic dominance in asymmetric predator-prey games

“…By studying such mobility patterns, one could get a better understanding of how important the cognitive abilities are in defining hunting strategies [1]. Moreover, these patterns are also important for the demographic distribution of both predators and preys since the shuffling of strategies, depending on how random [49] the mobility is, may decrease the spatial correlation and destroy local structures, changing the spatial organization of preys and predators [43].…”