Abstract
Animals often travel in groups, and their navigational decisions can be influenced by social interactions. Both theory and empirical observations suggest that such collective navigation can result in individuals improving their ability to find their way and could be one of the key benefits of sociality for these species. Here, we provide an overview of the potential mechanisms underlying collective navigation, review the known, and supposed, empirical evidence for such behaviour and highlight interesting directions for future research. We further explore how both social and collective learning during group navigation could lead to the accumulation of knowledge at the population level, resulting in the emergence of migratory culture.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Collective movement ecology’.
Highlights
Animal movement is a fundamental driver of ecological and evolutionary processes
We review the growing literature on collective navigation in order to: (i) provide an overview of the theoretical mechanisms by which social interactions can facilitate navigational benefits; (ii) synthesize empirical support for these mechanisms across several taxa, both in controlled experiments and in observations from the field; (iii) explore how social and collective learning may allow for the accumulation of information at the population level, leading to the emergence of animal culture in a migratory context and (iv) highlight potentially fruitful directions to further the study of collective animal navigation, especially with the use of new technologies
We describe five broad mechanisms for collective navigation: many wrongs, emergent sensing, leadership, social learning and collective learning
Summary
Animal movement is a fundamental driver of ecological and evolutionary processes. Movement, and migrations, couple disparate populations and ecosystems by transporting individuals, nutrients, pathogens and genes [1,2]. We review the growing literature on collective navigation in order to: (i) provide an overview of the theoretical mechanisms by which social interactions can facilitate navigational benefits; (ii) synthesize empirical support for these mechanisms across several taxa, both in controlled experiments and in observations from the field; (iii) explore how social and collective learning may allow for the accumulation of information at the population level, leading to the emergence of animal culture in a migratory context and (iv) highlight potentially fruitful directions to further the study of collective animal navigation, especially with the use of new technologies. We show that the five mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, and collective navigation can be the result of a complex and dynamic set of processes spanning multiple spatial and temporal scales These mechanisms may apply to many other navigational tasks in addition to migrations. We allude to some of these less well studied taxa as potential directions for future research
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