Mobbing in animals: a thorough review and proposed future directions

Abstract

Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by predators, warn others, and communicate about the predator’s threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of it have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still know little about its ecology and the evolutionary pressures that gave rise to this ubiquitous anti-predator behavior. In this review, we explore what mobbing is, how it is used, what its functions are thought to be, its use as a proxy for cognition, before providing suggestions for specific future avenues of research necessary to improve our understanding of mobbing in its ecological and evolutionary context.