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Walther, F. R. (1991). On herding behavior. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci., 29(1-4), 5–13.
Abstract: Herding behavior in ungulates is executed mainly by males. There are several forms of herding: guarding a single estrous female; rounding up a bunch of females during the rutting season; territorial herding by which a male keeps females inside his territory; herding of a moving, permanent, harem group; social herding in which group members of both sexes are herded by one dominant male. When put into this sequence, a phenotypical trend is illustrated, leading from an intimate connection of herding with mating behavior toward an increasing independence from sexual behavior and culminating in a complete socialization of herding. Aspects and problems of herding behavior are the recognition of, and the animal's respect for, partners in gregarious species; the animal “taking offense” at activities of others which deviate from its own activity; the active coordination and synchronization of group activities; the use of, and the effects of, threat, dominance and courtship displays in herding; the possibility of substitution among expressive displays in relation to partners of different sex; the communicative function of the animal's orientation relative to the partner; social hierarchy and leadership in a group; the possibility of interspecific herding, particularly in man-animal relationships, which is closely linked to the process of domestication.
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Sato, S. (1982). Leadership during actual grazing in a small herd of cattle. Appl. Animal. Ethol., 8(1-2), 53–65.
Abstract: An understanding of patterns of leadership during grazing movements is important where the management of grazing cattle is concerned. This paper describes the leadership displayed by grazing cattle by recording the spatial relationship (grazing style) among herd members as the group progressed slowly through a field. Grazing style was divided into “A”, “B” and “C”, meaning following, independence and leading, respectively. The results revealed the following features: (1) the frequency distributions of grazing style and grazing formation used by the herd varied with the seasons; (2) the individual animal variation in grazing style did not fundamentally change with the seasons; (3) there was negative linear correlation between Styles A and C and between Styles A and B. The more any cow followed the grazing movement, the less likely it was to lead the grazing movement or to be independent. Styles C and B tended to be positively related; (4) high, medium and low ranking animals in social dominance showed tendencies to behave in Styles C, A and B, respectively; (5) grazing style and weight gain were not clearly related; (6) the cows that tended to lead, be independent or follow less, tended to get out of their paddocks. The observations suggested (1) that the leader-follower-independent relationship, although modified in each season, did not vary fundamentally, (2) that the active movement of high ranking animals and the independent movement of low ranking animals governed the voluntary formation in grazing, and (3) that as grazing cattle that behaved in a single group and did not escape from their paddock were much easier to manage, the grazing style that expressed these characteristics was one of the significant indices for management of grazing cattle.
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Syme, G. J., & Syme, L. A. (1975). The concept of spatial leadership in farm animals: An experiment with sheep. Anim. Behav., 23(Part 4), 921–925.
Abstract: The concept of spatial leadership as applied to farm animals is discussed with particular emphasis on methodological problems. Using three experimental procedures forced spatial leadership orders were measured in a group of Romney ewes. Comparisons between orders showed the effects of both the different experimental tasks and the social context on leadership structure. Both these variables were found to affect the orders obtained. The results are interpreted in terms of the utility of the concept of spatial leadership in domestic animals and the necessity for more systematic procedural investigations in this area.
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Dunbar, R. I., & Dunbar, E. P. (1976). Contrasts in social structure among black-and-white colobus monkey groups. Anim. Behav., 24(1), 84–92.
Abstract: Three types of Colobus guereza groups may be distinguished on the bases of size and composition, namely small one-male groups, large, one-male groups and multi-male groups. The social structure of each type of group is described in terms of the distribution of non-agonistic interactions, the frequency and distribution of agonistic behaviour and the organization of the roles of vigilance, territorial defence and leadership. A number of differences are found between the group types which appear to be related to the differences in group size and composition. It is suggested that these group types represent stages in the life-cycle of colobus groups, and that such an interpretation may help to resolve some of the conflicting reports in the literature.
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Reebs S.G. (2000). Can a minority of informed leaders determine the foraging movements of a fish shoal? Anim. Behav., 59(2), 403–409.
Abstract: There is no information on whether the daily foraging movements of fish shoals are the result of chance, the collective will of all shoalmates, or the leadership of a few individuals. This study tested the latter possibility. Shoals of 12 golden shiners, Notemigonus crysoleucas, were trained to expect food around midday in one of the brightly lit corners of their tank. They displayed daily food-anticipatory activity by leaving the shady area of their tank and spending more and more time in the food corner up to the normal time of feeding. Past this normal time they remained in the shade, even on test days when no food was delivered. Most of these experienced individuals were then replaced by naive ones. The resulting ratio of experienced:naive fish could be 5:7, 3:9 or 1:11. On their own, na?ve individuals would normally spend the whole day in the shade, but in all tests the experienced individual(s) were able to entrain these more numerous naive fish out of the shade and into the brightly lit food corner at the right time of day. Entrainment was stronger in the 5:7 than in the 1:11 experiment. The test shoals never split up and were always led by the same fish, presumably the experienced individuals. These results indicate that in a strongly gregarious species, such as the golden shiner, a minority of informed individuals can lead a shoal to food, either through social facilitation of foraging movements or by eliciting following behaviour. Copyright 2000 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour
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di Bitetti, M. S., & Janson, C. H. (2001). Social foraging and the finder's share in capuchin monkeys, Cebus apella. Anim. Behav., 62(1), 47–56.
Abstract: Group living can confer advantages to individuals, but it can also impose severe costs through resource competition. Kleptoparasitism is one example in which some individuals (joiners) can exploit the food discovered by other animals (finders). This type of social foraging has been modelled either as an information-sharing model or as a producer-scrounger game. An important variable in these models is the finder's advantage: the number of items obtained by the finder before the arrival of other individuals. In this study we describe how the spatial position and rank of individuals in a group of wild tufted capuchin monkeys affect their ability to discover and exploit new food sources. We also analyse the factors that affect the finder's share and the total amount of food obtained by the finder from a newly discovered resource. By placing platforms filled with bananas at novel locations in their home range, we show that animals in the leading edge of a foraging group have a higher probability of discovering new food sources than animals occupying other spatial positions. The alpha male and the alpha female, which tended to occupy central-forward positions, were able to monopolize newly discovered food sources and thus obtain a major share of them. The finder's share at the feeding platforms was smaller when there was more food on a platform, but increased with longer delays before the arrival of other individuals. The total amount of food obtained by the finder from the feeding platforms was larger when there was more food on the platform, when the finder was of higher social status, and when it took longer for other individuals to arrive. Animals can increase their finder's share and total amount consumed from a newly discovered resource by keeping large interindividual distances and by avoiding giving cues about the presence of food (such as food-associated vocalizations) to other animals.
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Di Bitetti, M. S. (1997). Evidence for an important social role of allogrooming in a platyrrhine primate. Anim. Behav., 54(1), 199–211.
Abstract: Allogrooming behaviour was analysed in a wild group of tufted capuchin monkeys,Cebus apellain Iguazu National Park, Argentina. Evidence is provided that allogrooming in this platyrrhine species serves an important social function, as has been demonstrated for catarrhine primates. Using ad libitum sampling, 654 grooming sessions were recorded during 740 contact hours with one group. Seasonal variation was found in daily time allocation to allogrooming and the mean duration and reciprocity of sessions. Individual dominance rank was an important determinant of grooming relationships. The dominant male and female were the most actively involved in grooming. Among adults, dominant individuals were involved in more sessions than were subordinate individuals. The females maintained strong grooming relationships with each other and tended to reciprocate more within sessions than did males. Oestrous females engaged in more grooming bouts with adult males than did non-oestrous females. Females with newborn infants were attractive social partners for the remaining members of the group. A social function for allogrooming inCebusis indicated by the close relationship between allogrooming, the social system and coalition formation, and by the changes in quantity and direction of grooming in response to oestrous behaviour and to the birth of infants.
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Bugnyar, T., & Kotrschal, K. (2004). Leading a conspecific away from food in ravens ( Corvus corax)? Anim. Cogn., 7(2), 69–76.
Abstract: Active misleading of conspecifics has been described as a social strategy mainly for primates. Here we report a raven leading a competitor away from food in a social foraging task. Four individuals had to search and compete for hidden food at color-marked clusters of artificial food caches. At the beginning of the experiment, a subordinate male found and exploited the majority of the food. As a result, the dominant male displaced him from the already opened boxes. The subordinate male then developed a pattern, when the loss of reward to the dominant got high, of moving to unrewarded clusters and opening boxes there. This diversion often led the dominant to approach those unrewarded clusters and the subordinate then had a head start for exploiting the rewarded boxes. Subsequently, however, the dominant male learned not to follow the subordinate to unrewarded clusters and eventually started searching for the reward himself. These interactions between the two males illustrate the ravens' potential for deceptively manipulating conspecifics. We discuss under which circumstances ravens might use this capacity.
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Huber, L., & Gajdon, G. K. (2006). Technical intelligence in animals: the kea model. Anim. Cogn., 9(4), 295–305.
Abstract: The ability to act on information flexibly is one of the cornerstones of intelligent behavior. As particularly informative example, tool-oriented behavior has been investigated to determine to which extent nonhuman animals understand means-end relations, object affordances, and have specific motor skills. Even planning with foresight, goal-directed problem solving and immediate causal inference have been a focus of research. However, these cognitive abilities may not be restricted to tool-using animals but may be found also in animals that show high levels of curiosity, object exploration and manipulation, and extractive foraging behavior. The kea, a New Zealand parrot, is a particularly good example. We here review findings from laboratory experiments and field observations of keas revealing surprising cognitive capacities in the physical domain. In an experiment with captive keas, the success rate of individuals that were allowed to observe a trained conspecific was significantly higher than that of naive control subjects due to their acquisition of some functional understanding of the task through observation. In a further experiment using the string-pulling task, a well-probed test for means-end comprehension, we found the keas finding an immediate solution that could not be improved upon in nine further trials. We interpreted their performance as insightful in the sense of being sensitive of the relevant functional properties of the task and thereby producing a new adaptive response without trial-and-error learning. Together, these findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the distribution of higher cognitive skills in the animal kingdom by showing high levels of sensorimotor intelligence in animals that do not use tools. In conclusion, we suggest that the 'Technical intelligence hypothesis' (Byrne, Machiavellian intelligence II: extensions and evaluations, pp 289-211, 1997), which has been proposed to explain the origin of the ape/monkey grade-shift in intelligence by a selection pressure upon an increased efficiency in foraging behavior, should be extended, that is, applied to some birds as well.
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Campbell, F. M., Heyes, C. M., & Goldsmith, A. R. (1999). Stimulus learning and response learning by observation in the European starling, in a two-object/two-action test. Anim. Behav., 58(1), 151–158.
Abstract: Juvenile European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris , were allowed to observe a conspecific demonstrator using its beak to remove one of two distinctively coloured objects (i.e. a red or a black plug) from a hole in the lid of a plastic box. Both plugs could be removed by either pulling up on a loop of string inserted through the centre of the plug, or pushing down on the plug. When subsequently allowed access to the plugs, and rewarded with food for all removal responses, regardless of the object to which they were made and their direction, observer birds removed the same plug in the same direction as their demonstrator. These results suggest that the two-object/two-action paradigm is a valuable procedure for testing for the simultaneous effects of learning about a stimulus and a response, an object and an action, through conspecific observation.
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