Abstract
For group-living animals traveling through heterogeneous landscapes, collective movement can be influenced by both habitat structure and social interactions. Yet research in collective behavior has largely neglected habitat influences on movement. Here we integrate simultaneous, high-resolution, tracking of wild baboons within a troop with a 3-dimensional reconstruction of their habitat to identify key drivers of baboon movement. A previously unexplored social influence - baboons' preference for locations that other troop members have recently traversed - is the most important predictor of individual movement decisions. Habitat is shown to influence movement over multiple spatial scales, from long-range attraction and repulsion from the troop's sleeping site, to relatively local influences including road-following and a short-range avoidance of dense vegetation. Scaling to the collective level reveals a clear association between habitat features and the emergent structure of the group, highlighting the importance of habitat heterogeneity in shaping group coordination.
Highlights
Across a wide range of taxa and habitats, animals exhibit coordinated group movement
For social animals moving in complex, heterogeneous environments, individual decisions and the resulting collective movement patterns are likely to be driven by a combination of factors, including habitat and social influence
Studies of collective motion have tended to discount the potential role of environmental complexity by either conducting experiments in relatively simple or featureless environments composed of mostly unobstructed space, as in many lab experiments (Buhl et al, 2006; Katz et al, 2011; Herbert-Read et al, 2011; Rosenthal et al, 2015), or when they do consider animals moving in structured environments, by focusing only on social influences on movement (Biro et al, 2006; Strandburg-Peshkin et al, 2015; King and Sueur, 2011)
Summary
Across a wide range of taxa and habitats, animals exhibit coordinated group movement. For social animals moving in complex, heterogeneous environments, individual decisions and the resulting collective movement patterns are likely to be driven by a combination of factors, including habitat and social influence. Studies of collective motion have tended to discount the potential role of environmental complexity by either conducting experiments in relatively simple or featureless environments composed of mostly unobstructed space, as in many lab experiments (Buhl et al, 2006; Katz et al, 2011; Herbert-Read et al, 2011; Rosenthal et al, 2015) (but see [Berdahl et al, 2013]), or when they do consider animals moving in structured environments, by focusing only on social influences on movement (Biro et al, 2006; Strandburg-Peshkin et al, 2015; King and Sueur, 2011).
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