Alternate modes of leadership in collective behaviour

Understanding interactions between individuals is imperative for predicting how groups may react to changing environmental landscapes. Animal populations have displayed variation in behaviour when responding to different environmental cues. Variation in behaviour has been linked to differences in physiology, including metabolic phenotypes and locomotor performance. Understanding how these differences in individuals present themselves in groups provides insight into how physiology affects group behaviour, and how this may change in different contexts. Collective movement in animals is an increasingly prevalent theme in behavioural research, and understanding how and why groups decide to move is critical to our knowledge of animal life. Group movement may emerge from the decisions of one or few individuals, i.e. leadership, or be a shared decision by all individuals. Leadership has been previously linked to individual behavioural traits, which has also been related to physiological differences, however the specific links between physiology and leadership are understudied. Using laboratory experiments, I investigated the role of physiology in leadership of schools of fish, and how different contexts altered leadership in groups in order to examine how groups move and the mechanisms underpinning leadership. In the first data chapter, I tested whether metabolic composition of groups affected leadership by compiling groups of nine fish according to their standard metabolic rate and recorded their swimming behaviour. We measured behaviour at 15 °C, and again at 18 °C to see how temperature increases affect leadership and group dynamics. We found that metabolic composition had no consistent effect on group behaviour and leadership, but increases in temperature caused fish to be less synchronised and leadership to be disrupted. The metabolic cost of digestion has been shown to affect individual behaviour. Our second experiment investigated how group behaviour changed with feeding and time since feeding. Before and during feeding showed relationships between behaviour and meal size, where fish that ate the most were found to be followers when a leader was accelerating, however a fish who has eaten more food is more likely to be a leader when turning. There was no association between meal size and leadership after feeding, however leadership in groups changed before and after feeding events. Our results from chapter 3 and 4 indicated that different environmental contexts disrupted group behaviour, rather than creating consistent differences in specific individual leadership ability. To see how social context affected these metrics, I tested individual swimming performance testing how cost of transport related to leadership and see how individuals alter their voluntary swim speeds to stay within groups and how this relates to their physiological optimum. We found that higher cumulative costs are found when swimming alone compared to groups. Leadership is also not linked to deviation from optimum swim speed, showing that leaders in groups do not influence groups to swim at their optimum swim speed. This study confirms that leadership is not more costly in terms of transport speed, and overall swimming in groups is less costly than swimming alone. These results provide evidence that changing contexts affect group behaviour and leadership in schools of fish. Leadership may not be attributed to one or few specific individuals however how leadership is distributed among individuals may still change in different contexts. Chapters 3 and 4 suggest that physiological processes affect leadership behaviour, and chapter 5 shows that social context will affect group behaviour. Our results provide insight into how leadership in groups change in different contexts and how I may expect collective behaviour to change with environmental variation groups may experience in the wild

#GlockeAktiv: A corpus linguistic study of German youth language on YouTube

This thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018. The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas: 1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation. 2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language. 3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This iii iv analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis. By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing

Messing with nature? Exploring public perceptions of geoengineering in the UK

Anthropogenic influence on the climate – and possible societal responses to it – offers a unique window through which to examine the way people think about and relate to the natural world. This paper reports data from four, one-day deliberative workshops conducted with members of the UK public during early 2012. The workshops focused on geoengineering – the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment – as one of three possible responses to climate change (alongside mitigation and adaptation). Here, we explore one of the most pervasive and wide-ranging themes to emerge from the workshops: whether geoengineering represented an unprecedented human intervention into ‘nature’, and what the moral consequences of this might be. Using the concept of ‘messing with nature’ as an analytical lens, we explore public perceptions of geoengineering. We also reflect on why ‘messing with nature’ was such a focal point for debate and disagreement, and whether the prospect of geoengineering may reveal new dimensions to the way that people think about the natural world, and their relationship to it

Guidelines for reporting methods to estimate metabolic rates by aquatic intermittent-flow respirometry

Interest in the measurement of metabolic rates is growing rapidly, because of the importance of metabolism in advancing our understanding of organismal physiology, behaviour, evolution and responses to environmental change. The study of metabolism in aquatic animals is undergoing an especially pronounced expansion, with more researchers utilising intermittent-flow respirometry as a research tool than ever before. Aquatic respirometry measures the rate of oxygen uptake as a proxy for metabolic rate, and the intermittent-flow technique has numerous strengths for use with aquatic animals, allowing metabolic rate to be repeatedly estimated on individual animals over several hours or days and during exposure to various conditions or stimuli. There are, however, no published guidelines for the reporting of methodological details when using this method. Here, we provide the first guidelines for reporting intermittent-flow respirometry methods, in the form of a checklist of criteria that we consider to be the minimum required for the interpretation, evaluation and replication of experiments using intermittent-flow respirometry. Furthermore, using a survey of the existing literature, we show that there has been incomplete and inconsistent reporting of methods for intermittent-flow respirometry over the past few decades. Use of the provided checklist of required criteria by researchers when publishing their work should increase consistency of the reporting of methods for studies that use intermittent-flow respirometry. With the steep increase in studies using intermittent-flow respirometry, now is the ideal time to standardise reporting of methods, so that - in the future - data can be properly assessed by other scientists and conservationists

Perceptions of Marine Science as a Field-based Discipline: Highlighting Digital Twinning of the Oceans as a Complementary and More Inclusive Pathway into a Career in the Marine Sciences

No abstract available

Contemporary Discourses of Green Political Economy: A Q Method Analysis

For over two decades, the concept of sustainable development has been salient in political discourse. But its promise of reconciling economic development, social welfare, and environmental sustainability has proven rather elusive. In recent years, we've seen numerous competing concepts emerge in debates about sustainable economic development. While many advance ideas of a green economy and green growth, others talk about wellbeing, gross national happiness, inclusive wealth, harmony with nature, de-growth, steady-state economy, and buenvivir (living well). This rhetorical diversity shows that there is no single vision for reconciling environmental sustainability and economic development. But the varied terminology itself obscures actual points of agreement and disagreement. This article reports on a bilingual ‘Q study’ of international debates about sustainable economic development. It reveals that three discourses underpin these debates: Radical Transformationism; Cooperative Reformism; and Statist Progressivism. The article dissects these discourses and contextualizes their key points of contention in wider sustainability debates over the past two decades