Our research is/has been funded by: ASAB, AXA Research Fund, BBSRC, EPSRC, GCRF, NERC, ONR Global, The Centre for Ecology and Evolution (London), The Leverhulme Trust, The Royal Society, The Royal Veterinary College (London), and Swansea University.

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Sociality

 

Individuals interact. We use direct observations and high-resolution tracking of individuals, combined with mathematical simulations or agent-based models, to study the mechanisms, adaptive value, and flexibility of social behaviour. We study lots of different social species, and two of our favourites are stickleback fish (in the lab), and chacma baboons (wild populations in Namibia and South Africa). Testing and refining methodological and analytical approaches is also important to this work. For a summary of the approach we take, see King et al. (2018).

 

Heterogeneity

 

Phenotypic differences among individuals are important to the structure and functioning of animal groups. Our aim is to understand this individual heterogeneity and its social, ecological, and evolutionary consequences. For example, see Bousquet et al. (2024) for a discussion of how heterogeneity effects communication in social vertebrate group decisions, and Jolles et al. (2019) for the role of individual heterogeneity in collective animal behaviour. Recently, we have also been using our data and theory to engineer better performing artificial swarm systems. 

 

Organisation

 

We investigate how animal behaviour is organised in space and time (past, present, and future). This work has both pure and applied research themes. Applied work includes developing tools for assessing N pollution arising from sheep-grazed pastures, and testing effects of ocean acidification on fish behaviour. Blue skies research aims to test investigate the evolutionary ecology of collective movement across vertebrates, and has led to the development of new R package 'swaRmverse' to analyse collective motion. 

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And Leadership

 

Groups of animals need to make collective decisions about what to do and when to do it, if they are to remain as a cohesive group. We study the various ways such group decisions can be made and are particularly interested in how leadership has evolved as a fundamental means to solve coordination problems and resolve within-group conflict of interest. We have studied leadership and group decisions in fish, sheep, goats, African wild dogs, baboons, and humans. For a short review on leadership, see King et al. (2009).

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