43 research outputs found
Creation of prompt and thin-sheet splashing by varying surface roughness or increasing air pressure
A liquid drop impacting a solid surface may splash by emitting a thin liquid
sheet that subsequently breaks apart or by promptly ejecting droplets from the
advancing liquid-solid contact line. Using high-speed imaging, we show that air
pressure and surface roughness influence both splash mechanisms. Roughness
increases prompt splashing at the advancing contact line but inhibits the
formation of the thin sheet. If the air pressure is lowered, droplet ejection
is suppressed not only during thin-sheet formation but for prompt splashing as
well. The threshold pressure depends on impact velocity, liquid viscosity and
surface roughness
Disentangling influence over group speed and direction reveals multiple patterns of influence in moving meerkat groups
Animals that travel together in groups must constantly come to consensus about both the direction and speed of movement, often simultaneously. Contributions to collective decisions may vary among group members, yet inferring who has influence over group decisions is challenging, largely due to the multifaceted nature of influence. Here we collected high-resolution GPS data from five habituated meerkat groups in their natural habitat during foraging and developed a method to quantify individual influence over both group direction and speed. We find that individual influence over direction and speed are correlated, but also exhibit substantial variation. Comparing patterns across social statuses reveals that dominant females have higher influence than other individuals over both group direction and speed. Individuals with high influence also tend to spend more time in the front of the group. We discuss our results in light of meerkat life-history and current literature on influence during group movement. Our method provides a general approach which can be applied to disentangle individual influence over group direction and speed in a wide range of species with cohesive movement, emphasizing the importance of integrating multiple lines of inquiry when inferring influence in moving animal groups
Long-distance vocalizations of spotted hyenas contain individual, but not group, signatures
In animal societies, identity signals are common, mediate interactions within groups, and allow individuals to discriminate group-mates from out-group competitors. However, individual recognition becomes increasingly challenging as group size increases and as signals must be transmitted over greater distances. Group vocal signatures may evolve when successful in-group/out-group distinctions are at the crux of fitness-relevant decisions, but group signatures alone are insufficient when differentiated within-group relationships are important for decision-making. Spotted hyenas are social carnivores that live in stable clans of less than 125 individuals composed of multiple unrelated matrilines. Clan members cooperate to defend resources and communal territories from neighbouring clans and other mega carnivores; this collective defence is mediated by long-range (up to 5 km range) recruitment vocalizations, called whoops. Here, we use machine learning to determine that spotted hyena whoops contain individual but not group signatures, and that fundamental frequency features which propagate well are critical for individual discrimination. For effective clan-level cooperation, hyenas face the cognitive challenge of remembering and recognizing individual voices at long range. We show that serial redundancy in whoop bouts increases individual classification accuracy and thus extended call bouts used by hyenas probably evolved to overcome the challenges of communicating individual identity at long distance
Directional speakers as a tool for animal vocal communication studies
Audio playbacks are a common experimental tool in vocal communication research. However, low directionality of sound makes it hard to control the audience exposed to the stimuli. Parametric speakers offer a solution for transmitting directional audible signals by using ultrasonic carrier waves. The targeted transmission of vocal signals offers exciting opportunities for testing the diffusion of information in animal groups and mechanisms for resolving informational ambiguities. We have field tested the quality and directionality of a commercial parametric speaker, Soundlazer SL-01. Additionally, we assessed its usability for performing playback experiments by comparing behavioural responses of free-ranging meerkats (Suricata suricatta) with calls transmitted from conventional and parametric speakers. Our results show that the tested parametric speaker is highly directional. However, the acoustic structure of meerkat calls was strongly affected and low frequencies were not reliably reproduced by the parametric speaker. The playback trials elicited weakened behavioural responses probably due to the partial distortion of the signal but also indicating the potential importance of social facilitation for initiating mobbing events in meerkats. We conclude that parametric speakers can be useful tools for directed transmission of animals calls but after a careful assessment of signal fidelity
Link updating strategies influence consensus decisions as a function of the direction of communication
Consensus decision-making in social groups strongly depends on communication
links that determine to whom individuals send, and from whom they receive,
information. Here, we ask how consensus decisions are affected by strategic
updating of links and how this effect varies with the direction of
communication. We quantified the co-evolution of link and opinion dynamics in a
large population with binary opinions using mean-field numerical simulations of
two voter-like models of opinion dynamics: an Incoming model (where individuals
choose who to receive opinions from) and an Outgoing model (where individuals
choose who to send opinions to). We show that individuals can bias group-level
outcomes in their favor by breaking disagreeing links while receiving opinions
(Incoming Model) and retaining disagreeing links while sending opinions
(Outgoing Model). Importantly, these biases can help the population avoid
stalemates and achieve consensus. However, the role of disagreement avoidance
is diluted in the presence of strong preferences - highly stubborn individuals
can shape decisions to favor their preferences, giving rise to non-consensus
outcomes. We conclude that collectively changing communication structures can
bias consensus decisions, as a function of the strength of preferences and the
direction of communication
Signalling in groups: New tools for the integration of animal communication and collective movement
Investigations of collective movement and animal communication have often followed distinct, though complementary, trajectories. Both subfields are deeply concerned with how information flows between individuals and shapes subsequent behaviour. Collective movement has largely focused on the dynamics of passive, cue-mediated group coordination, while animal communication has primarily examined the content and function of active dyadic signal exchanges in senderâreceiver frameworks. However, in many social groups, network-wide signalling and collective movement decisions are tightly linked.
Here we discuss opportunities afforded by using multi-sensor tracking tags to simultaneously monitor the fine-scale movements and vocalisations of entire social groups. We highlight how such data can elucidate the role of vocal signals in individual and collective movement while illuminating the structures of entire vocal-interaction sequences at previously unexamined timescales and across entire communication networks.
We identify practical and analytical challenges associated with these new tools and datasets, and present avenues for addressing them. We specifically address issues associated with the deployment and synchronisation of multiple tags, the processing and interpretation of resulting multidimensional datasets, and the benefits of combining tag-based data collection with experimental approaches.
Finally, we argue that a comparative approach employing consistent methodologies across a range of environments, populations and systems is needed to shed light on the evolutionary ecology of communication and collective behaviour
A practical guide for generating unsupervised, spectrogram-based latent space representations of animal vocalizations
© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Thomas, M., Jensen, F. H., Averly, B., Demartsev, V., Manser, M. B., Sainburg, T., Roch, M. A., & Strandburg-Peshkin, A. A practical guide for generating unsupervised, spectrogram-based latent space representations of animal vocalizations. The Journal of Animal Ecology, 91(8), (2022): 1567â 1581, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13754.1. Background: The manual detection, analysis and classification of animal vocalizations in acoustic recordings is laborious and requires expert knowledge. Hence, there is a need for objective, generalizable methods that detect underlying patterns in these data, categorize sounds into distinct groups and quantify similarities between them. Among all computational methods that have been proposed to accomplish this, neighbourhood-based dimensionality reduction of spectrograms to produce a latent space representation of calls stands out for its conceptual simplicity and effectiveness.
2. Goal of the study/what was done: Using a dataset of manually annotated meerkat Suricata suricatta vocalizations, we demonstrate how this method can be used to obtain meaningful latent space representations that reflect the established taxonomy of call types. We analyse strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach, give recommendations for its usage and show application examples, such as the classification of ambiguous calls and the detection of mislabelled calls.
3. What this means: All analyses are accompanied by example code to help researchers realize the potential of this method for the study of animal vocalizations.This work was supported by HFSP Research Grant RGP0051/2019 to ASP, MBM and MAR, and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under Germany's Excellence Strategy (EXC-2117-422037984). ASP received additional funding from the Gips-SchĂŒle Stiftung, the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz and the Max-Planck-Institute of Animal Behaviour. VD was funded by the Minerva Stiftung and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Signalling in groups : new tools for the integration of animal communication and collective movement
Investigations of collective movement and animal communication have often followed distinct, though complementary, trajectories. Both subfields are deeply concerned with how information flows between individuals and shapes subsequent behaviour. Collective movement has largely focused on the dynamics of passive, cue-mediated group coordination, while animal communication has primarily examined the content and function of active dyadic signal exchanges in senderâreceiver frameworks. However, in many social groups, network-wide signalling and collective movement decisions are tightly linked.
Here we discuss opportunities afforded by using multi-sensor tracking tags to simultaneously monitor the fine-scale movements and vocalisations of entire social groups. We highlight how such data can elucidate the role of vocal signals in individual and collective movement while illuminating the structures of entire vocal-interaction sequences at previously unexamined timescales and across entire communication networks.
We identify practical and analytical challenges associated with these new tools and datasets, and present avenues for addressing them. We specifically address issues associated with the deployment and synchronisation of multiple tags, the processing and interpretation of resulting multidimensional datasets, and the benefits of combining tag-based data collection with experimental approaches.
Finally, we argue that a comparative approach employing consistent methodologies across a range of environments, populations and systems is needed to shed light on the evolutionary ecology of communication and collective behaviour.Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung; Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour; Human Frontier Science Program; Minerva Foundation; Gips-SchĂŒle Foundation. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mee3hj2022Mammal Research Institut