Abstract
Out of all the complex phenomena displayed in the behaviour of animal groups, many are thought to be emergent properties of rather simple decisions at the individual level. Some of these phenomena may also be explained by random processes only. Here we investigate to what extent the interaction dynamics of a population of wild house mice (Mus domesticus) in their natural environment can be explained by a simple stochastic model. We first introduce the notion of perceptual landscape, a novel tool used here to describe the utilisation of space by the mouse colony based on the sampling of individuals in discrete locations. We then implement the behavioural assumptions of the perceptual landscape in a multi-agent simulation to verify their accuracy in the reproduction of observed social patterns. We find that many high-level features – with the exception of territoriality – of our behavioural dataset can be accounted for at the population level through the use of this simplified representation. Our findings underline the potential importance of random factors in the apparent complexity of the mice's social structure. These results resonate in the general context of adaptive behaviour versus elementary environmental interactions.
Highlights
In a famous passage of his book The Sciences of the Artificial [1] the sociologist Herbert Simon considers the winding, weaving path of an ant as it makes its journey home across the rugged landscape of a wind- and wave-beaten sandy beach
We have developed a framework based on such random assumptions to study the spatial and social structure of a population of wild house mice
We introduce the concept of perceptual landscape to describe the spatial behaviour of animals, whilst including all sensory and social constraints they are subject to: the perceptual landscape effectively maps the environment of animals as they perceive it
Summary
In a famous passage of his book The Sciences of the Artificial [1] the sociologist Herbert Simon considers the winding, weaving path of an ant as it makes its journey home across the rugged landscape of a wind- and wave-beaten sandy beach. He notes that, whilst the homebound ant has a clear destination, its progression along the path that leads to it is far from a straight line, due to the numerous obstacles encountered on the way. There is an ongoing debate today as to what aspects of the behaviour, and especially the social behaviour, observed in an animal species can be explained as a specific adaptation versus an emergent property of simple behavioural rules when individuals interact with their environment. If some emerging properties of a group’s social structure result from more simple behavioural mechanisms, it may be that what is thought to be an explicitly social behaviour does not require specific selective adaptations
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