Dear MARMAMers, My coauthors and I are pleased to share our new publication on collective decision making in long-finned pilot whales, which is now online.
Zwamborn E, Walmsley S & Whitehead H. 2023. Flanking female guides: collective decision making in long-finned pilot whales. Animal Behaviour, 205:149-159. You can access this article free of charge for the next 50 days here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1htlBmjM2RoU Abstract: Little is understood about how social cetaceans make collective decisions. Consensus processes are often beneficial for fitness at both a group and individual level, but most previous studies of decision making in whales and dolphins show evidence of a leader, frequently an individual with greater ecological knowledge or social connectedness. We used drone footage of long-finned pilot whales, *Globicephala melas*, off Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, to examine the characteristics of initial divers (age class/sex, relative position, accompanying calf) and the timing of when individuals dive (i.e. dive lag) within collective group dives (N = 73). Resting groups of pilot whales had three-fold higher mean dive lag and interindividual dive intervals than groups in other behavioural states. Females initiated dives more often than expected by chance and initial divers were most frequently located peripherally on the left or right flank of the group. Dive lags following the initial diver had a heavily right-skewed distri- bution, suggesting that long-finned pilot whales within groups are often responding to a stimulus (e.g. physical leadership, a vocal signal, an approaching vessel). These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that unequally distributed leadership guides the temporal patterning of the collective deep dives of pilot whales. Please contact me if you have any questions. Best, Elizabeth
_______________________________________________ MARMAM mailing list MARMAM@lists.uvic.ca https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/marmam
