Consistent individual differences drive collective behaviour and group functioning of schooling fish
Jolles, JW; Boogert, NJ; Sridhar, VH; et al.Couzin, ID; Manica, A
Date: 7 September 2017
Journal
Current Biology
Publisher
Elsevier
Publisher DOI
Abstract
The ubiquity of consistent inter-individual differences in behaviour (‘animal personalities ’) [1, 2] suggests
that they might play a fundamental role in driving the movements and functioning of animal
groups [3, 4], including their collective decision-making, foraging performance, and predator avoidance.
Despite increasing evidence ...
The ubiquity of consistent inter-individual differences in behaviour (‘animal personalities ’) [1, 2] suggests
that they might play a fundamental role in driving the movements and functioning of animal
groups [3, 4], including their collective decision-making, foraging performance, and predator avoidance.
Despite increasing evidence that highlights their importance [5–16], we still lack a unified mechanistic
framework to explain and to predict how consistent inter-individual differences may drive collective
behaviour. Here we investigate how the structure, leadership, movement dynamics, and foraging performance
of groups can emerge from inter-individual differences by high-resolution tracking of known
behavioural types in free-swimming stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) shoals. We show that individual’s
propensity to stay close to others, measured by a classic ‘sociability’ assay, was negatively linked
to swim speed across a range of contexts, and predicted spatial positioning and leadership within
groups as well as differences in structure and movement dynamics between groups. In turn, this trait
in combination with individual’s exploratory tendency, measured by a classic ‘boldness’ assay, explained
individual and group foraging performance. These effects of consistent individual differences
on group-level states emerged naturally from a generic model of self-organising groups composed of
individuals differing in speed and goal-orientedness. Our study provides experimental and theoretical
evidence for a simple mechanism to explain the emergence of collective behaviour from consistent individual
differences, including variation in the structure, leadership, movement dynamics, and functional
capabilities of groups, across social and ecological scales. In addition, we demonstrate individual performance
is conditional on group composition, indicating how social selection may drive behavioural
differentiation between individuals.
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's licence is described as © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).