31.10.23 - Marta Manser / Vlad Demartsev / Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin

Across social species, the coordination of behaviours and actions is often mediated by communication. However, the social and behavioural complexity of animal groups make it difficult to map communicative interactions and directly link them to the changes in individual and group behavioural states. By deploying animal-mounted sensors on all or most members of social groups in the wild, we can reconstruct detailed and temporally synchronised timelines of individual positions, behavioural states and vocal emissions. In this talk we will discuss ongoing collaborative work as part of the Communication & Coordination Across Scales project, where we are using these new tools to investigate a range of questions spanning levels of organisation. At the level of individual signallers, we examine the syntactic structure of acoustic signalling events. Combining data across individuals, we then map the temporal structure of multi-participant vocal interactions to characterise “conversation dynamics”, for example distinguishing between signal “broadcasts” and temporally-structured interactive exchanges. Finally, by experimentally introducing signals into a group and tracing individual responses in space and time, we can track how information propagates through groups to shape collective responses.