Animal collective behaviour: avoiding predators and making decisions in groups.
NERC funded competition: The importance of social behaviour in biological invasions
How, why and when do animals form and maintain groups? This has been an ongoing question in the study of animal behaviour for the past century. Recently this has been integrated across taxa as the field of 'collective behaviour', which often includes humans and artificial systems. My particular focus is on decisions made by groups (e.g. who makes decisions and how sharing information can improve decision making ability) and how predator behaviour shapes collective behaviour in animals. I typically use freshwater fish as a model system. However, I am also open to ideas for projects in this general area, and working on animals other than fish.Although you will be based in the School of Biological Sciences, I am happy to hear from applicants with any relevant background, particularly psychology, computer science, physics, engineering and mathematics. The School has one of the largest animal behaviour groups in the country, a thriving and friendly PhD community, and you will be joining at an exciting time with the move to our new £54m building in 2014.
Are you a top student? If so, I have a project that needs some excellent candidates to compete for funding (below). Contact me if you're interested:
Invasive species have a huge impact on the structure of natural communities and hence biodiversity. The Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata) is native to central America but is a common invasive species in tropical freshwater habitats where it feeds on the young of native aquatic species, causing their populations to decline sometimes to the point of local extinction. Despite the guppy’s clear ability to exploit new food sources in novel habitats, it is unknown how they survive encounters with novel predator species. Although this is a frequent issue for invasive species, the guppy provides a unique opportunity to study how invasive species adapt to new predators: in the Northern Range mountains of Trinidad, guppies are found in discrete river populations with different predator assemblages. Over a relatively short evolutionary time scale, the fish adapt locally to differences in predation with changes in behaviour, morphology and life history traits. Despite this inter-population variation, the differences remain much smaller than is commonly observed between native-invasive species pairings, allowing the guppy to be used as a model to isolate and study the importance of social interactions in the survival of individuals in novel habitats.
Predation may be avoided initially by shoaling with native individuals, followed by social learning allowing the fish to use newly acquired private information in subsequent encounters with that predator. As a long term goal, determining the social traits that allow individuals to avoid predation in novel habitats will help in identifying species that are likely to survive when introduced and thus pose the greatest threat of becoming invasive.
Recently the study of animal groups has been integrated with other disciplines as the multi- disciplinary field of collective behaviour. Although numerous techniques have been developed in this area through collaboration between biologists, physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians, their application to understanding conservation issues is under exploited. The project will use these techniques alongside more traditional ecological and behavioural approaches. Individual marking using elastomer tags will allow fish from different populations to be identified. Laboratory and field studies will examine how native and non-native guppies react to a range of predator species, and how this is affected by both the total number of prey fish (density dependence) and the proportion that are non-native (frequency dependence). The empirical emphasis of the project will allow us to quantify how native and non-native prey interact with each other and their predators as a complex system.
Funding Notes:
These studentships will be funded by NERC and are available to UK nationals and other EU nationals that have resided in the UK for three years prior to commencing the studentship. If you meet this criteria, funding will be provided for tuition fees and stipend. If you are a citizen of a EU member state you will eligible for a fees-only award.
References:
Berdahl B., Torney C.J., Ioannou C.C., Faria J.J., Couzin I.D. (2013) Emergent sensing of complex environments by social animal groups. Science, 339: 574-576, 10.1126/science.1225883.
Ioannou C.C., Guttal V., Couzin I.D. (2012). Predatory fish select for coordinated collective motion in virtual prey. Science, 337: 1212-1215, 10.1126/science.1218919.
Couzin I.D., Ioannou C.C., Demirel G., Gross T., Torney C.J., Hartnett A., Conradt L., Levin S.A., Leonard N.E. (2011). Uninformed individuals promote democratic consensus in animal groups. Science, 332: 1578-1580, 10.1126/science.1210280.
Katz Y., Tunstrøm K., Ioannou C.C., Huepe C., Couzin I.D. (2011). Inferring the structure and dynamics of interactions in schooling fish. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108: 18720-18725, 10.1073/pnas.1107583108.