Andrew J King

Swansea University | SWAN · Department of Biosciences

Herding of sheep by dogs is a powerful example of one individual causing many unwilling individuals to move in the same direction. Similar phenomena are central to crowd control, cleaning the environment and other engineering problems. Despite single dogs solving this 'shepherding problem' every day, it remains unknown which algorithm they employ o...

A range of species exploit anthropogenic food resources in behaviour known as 'raiding'. Such behavioural flexibility is considered a central component of a species' ability to cope with human-induced environmental changes. Here, we study the behavioural processes by which raiding male chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) exploit the opportunities and mi...

The earliest studies of collective animal behaviour were inspired by and conducted in the wild. Over the past decades much of the research in this field has shifted to the laboratory, combining high-resolution tracking of individuals with mathematical simulations or agent-based models. Today we are beginning to see a 're-wilding' of collective beha...

For group-living animals to remain cohesive they must agree on where to travel. Theoretical models predict shared group decisions should be favoured, and a number of empirical examples support this. However, the behavioural mechanisms that underpin shared decision-making are not fully understood. Groups may achieve consensus of direction by active...

Studies of self-organizing groups like schools of fish or flocks of birds have sought to uncover the behavioral rules individuals use (local-level interactions) to coordinate their motion (global-level patterns). However, empirical studies tend to focus on short-term or one-off observations where coordination has already been established or describ...

Collective motion, that is the coordinated spatial and temporal organisation of individuals, is a core element in the study of collective animal behaviour. The self‐organised properties of how a group moves influence its various behavioural and ecological processes, such as predator–prey dynamics, social foraging and migration. However, little is k...

Proximate mechanisms of ‘social ageing’, i.e. shifts in social activity and narrowing of social networks, are understudied. It is proposed that energetic deficiencies (which are often seen in older individuals) may restrict movement and, in turn, sociality, but empirical tests of these intermediary mechanisms are lacking. Here, we study wild chacma...

Social bonds increase fitness in a range of mammals. One pathway by which social bonds may increase fitness is by reducing the exposure to physiological stress, i.e. glucocorticoid (GC) hormones, that can be detrimental to health and survival. This is achieved through downregulating hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA)-axis activity. Indeed, long-t...

To receive the benefits of social living, individuals must make effective group decisions that enable them to achieve behavioural coordination and maintain cohesion. However, heterogeneity in the physical and social environments surrounding group decision-making contexts can increase the level of difficulty social organisms face in making decisions...

Individual consistency in behaviour, known as animal personality, and behavioural plasticity in response to environmental changes are important factors shaping individual behaviour. Correlations between them, called personality-dependent plasticity, indicate that personality can affect individual reactions to the environment. In farm animals this c...

Abstract Understanding the behavioral ecology of wildlife that experiences negative interactions with humans and the outcome of any wildlife management intervention is essential. In the Cape Peninsula, South Africa, chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) search for anthropogenic food sources in both urban and agricultural areas. In response, the city of Ca...

Species with slow life history strategies that invest in few offspring with extended parental care need to adapt their behavior to cope with anthropogenic changes that occur within their lifetime. Here we show that a female chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) that commonly ranges within urban space in the City of Cape Town, South Africa, stops using urba...

Quantification of activity budgets is pivotal for understanding how animals respond to changes in their environment. Social grooming is a key activity that underpins various social processes with consequences for health and fitness. Traditional methods use direct (focal) observations to calculate grooming rates, providing systematic but sparse data...

Animals have finite energy reserves for growth, survival, and reproduction and must maintain a stable energy balance. Measuring energy balance in the wild, however, is beset with methodological challenges. Quantification of urinary C-peptide (uCP), a proxy for insulin secretion, has enabled researchers to non-invasively estimate energy balance, and...

Most studies of collective animal behaviour rely on short-term observations, and comparisons of collective behaviour across different species and contexts are rare. We therefore have a limited understanding of intra- and interspecific variation in collective behaviour over time, which is crucial if we are to understand the ecological and evolutiona...

A single sheepdog can bring together and manoeuvre hundreds of sheep from one location to another. Engineers and ecologists are fascinated by this sheepdog herding because of the potential it provides for ‘bio‐herding’: a biologically inspired herding of animal groups by robots. Although many herding algorithms have been proposed, most are studied...

The authors investigated left–right turning preferences of n = 260 juvenile European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) reared in ambient conditions and ocean acidification (OA) conditions or in ambient conditions but tested in OA water. Groups of 10 individuals were observed alone in a circular tank, and individuals' left and right turning during fre...

Before visiting your local supermarket, do you write your food shopping list in the order you expect to encounter the items as you walk around, aisle by aisle? This way, you minimise your travel distance, saving time and effort. Many other animals do the same. Baboons (Papio ursinus) plan their foraging journeys to out-of-sight resources, moving in...

Glucocorticoids (GCs), a class of steroid hormones released through activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, perform many vital functions essential for survival, including orchestrating an organism’s response to stressors by modulating physiological and behavioural responses. Assessing changes and variation in GC metabolites fro...

Collective behaviour has a critical influence on group social structure and organization, individual fitness and social evolution, but we know little about whether and how it changes in anthropogenic environments. Here, we show multiple and varying effects of urban space-use upon group-level processes in a primate generalist-the chacma baboon (Papi...

Mechanistic models suggest that individuals’ memories could shape home range patterns and dynamics, and how neighbors share space. In social species, such dynamics of home range overlap may be affected by the pre-dispersal memories of immigrants. We tested this “immigrant knowledge hypothesis” in a wild population of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus)....

The presence of wildlife adjacent to and within urban spaces is a growing phenomenon globally. When wildlife’s presence in urban spaces has negative impacts for people and wildlife, nonlethal and lethal interventions on animals invariably result. Recent evidence suggests that individuals in wild animal populations vary in both their propensity to u...

The use of animal-borne devices in wildlife ecology and conservation has expanded in recent decades. Animal-borne devices allow a suite of data to be collected, including locational, acoustic, and video. They have revolutionized our ability to collect measurements from animals and the environments that they inhabit, as well as promote the conservat...

Modern studies of animal movement use the Global Positioning System (GPS) to estimate animals’ distance traveled. The temporal resolution of GPS fixes recorded should match those of the behavior of interest; otherwise estimates are likely to be inappropriate. Here, we investigate how different GPS sampling intervals affect estimated daily travel di...

Urine patches deposited in pasture by grazing animals are sites of reactive nitrogen (N) loss to the environment due to high concentrations of N exceeding pasture uptake requirements. In order to upscale N losses from the urine patch, several urination parameters are required, including where, when and how often urination events occur as well as th...

• Many animal personality traits have implicit movement‐based definitions and can directly or indirectly influence ecological and evolutionary processes. It has therefore been proposed that animal movement studies could benefit from acknowledging and studying consistent interindividual differences (personality), and, conversely, animal personality...

Humans have altered up to half of the world's land surface. Wildlife living within or close to these human-modified landscapes are presented with opportunities and risks associated with feeding on human-derived foods (e.g., agricultural crops and food waste). Understanding whether and how wildlife adapts to these landscapes is a major challenge, wi...

As human-modified landscapes encroach into natural habitats, wildlife face a reduction in natural food sources but also gain access to calorie-rich, human-derived foods. However, research into the energetics of wildlife living within and adjacent to urban and rural landscapes is lacking. C-peptide - a proxy for insulin production and a diagnostic t...

Ruminant urine patches are potential sites of reactive nitrogen (N) loss to the environment. Quantification of N losses from grazed grasslands requires measurement of the frequency of urine deposition, as well as its volume and chemical composition. However, studies to date are typically restricted to analyses of few replicate animals and urination...

Group-living animals can affect each other's behaviour, causing changes in the rate or type of behaviours performed (social facilitation), or convergence in behaviour to that displayed by the majority of neighbours (social conformity). Facilitation and conformity effects can act to reduce direct competition and/or enable social coordination, and th...

Social grouping is omnipresent in the animal kingdom. Considerable research has focused on understanding how animal groups form and function, including how collective behaviour emerges via self-organising mechanisms and how phenotypic variation drives the behaviour and functioning of animal groups. However, we still lack a mechanistic understanding...

Many social animal species produce vocalizations believed to facilitate group contraction when one or more group members have become distant. However, the mechanisms underlying this function remain unclear for many species. We examined this question with data on a semi-free ranging group of 16 adult domesticated goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) inhabi...

Dominance relationships imply consistent asymmetries in social relationships. Socioecological models predict that resource distribution determines the mode of competition that animals will face and, ultimately, the nature of their social relationships. Here, we provide the first systematic investigation of dominance style in white-nosed coatis (Nas...

Vultures are thought to form networks in the sky, with individuals monitoring the movements of others to gain up-to-date information on resource availability. While it is recognized that social information facilitates the search for carrion, how this facilitates the search for updrafts, another critical resource, remains unknown. In theory, birds c...

Groups of animals (including humans) may show flexible grouping patterns, in which temporary aggregations or subgroups come together and split, changing composition over short temporal scales, (i.e. fission and fusion). A high degree of fission-fusion dynamics may constrain the regulation of social relationships, introducing uncertainty in interact...

Animals as diverse as ants and humans are faced with the tasks of collecting, transporting or herding objects. Sheepdogs do this daily when they collect, herd, and maneuver flocks of sheep. Here, we adapt a shepherding algorithm inspired by sheepdogs to collect and transport objects using a robot. Our approach produces an effective robot collection...

In despotically driven animal societies, one or a few individuals tend to have a disproportionate influence on group decision-making and actions. However, global communication allows each group member to assess the relative strength of preferences for different options among their group-mates. Here, we investigate collective decisions by free-rangi...

Here we present the preliminary results of our research on the individual attributes related to network position among wild white-nosed coatis

This chapter reviews the consequences of exploitative strategies for individual behavior, social structure, and design of institutions. It outlines how natural selection should act to construct behavioral connections that maximize benefits and minimize costs of sociality for individuals. Individuals are predicted to show specific leaving or joining...

Any social unit cannot exist and persist without some form of collective decision making. Collective decisions result from an evaluation of possible options, during which a group reaches a single choice. Swarms, shoals, flocks, herds, and troops of animals make such collective decisions on a daily basis, which have important fitness consequences fo...

Many primates live in social groups because, on average, it pays to do so. While being in a group can increase competition for resources or the likelihood of contracting a disease, group living also provides more pairs of eyes for locating food sources and identifying potential threats. To evaluate the importance of social relationships requires an...

Background The use of accelerometers in bio-logging devices has proved to be a powerful tool for the quantification of animal behaviour. While bio-logging techniques are being used on wide range of species, to date they have only been seldom used with non-human primates. This is likely due to three main factors: the long tradition of direct field o...

Electronic Supplementary Material: Details of fish rearing conditions and three Supplementary Figures (Figures S1-S3) are provided

Ocean acidification (OA)-caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2)-is thought to be a major threat to marine ecosystems and has been shown to induce behavioural alterations in fish. Here we show behavioural resilience to nearfuture OA in a commercially important and migratory marine finfish, the Sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax). Sea ba...

Fehlmann and King introduce bio-logging techniques to track free-living animals.

Knowledge of length-weight relationships for commercially exploited fish is an important tool for assessing and managing of fish stocks. However, analyses of length-weight relationship fisheries data typically do not consider the inherent differences in length-weight relationships for fish caught from different habitats, seasons, or years, and this...

Dominance relationships imply consistent asymmetries in social relationships impacting both on the structure and dynamics of animal groups, and on actors’ fitness. Coatis species (Nasua spp. and Nasuella spp.) are the most abundant and gregarious carnivores of Neotropics. However, with a notable exception, the formal assessing of coati dominance ha...

Growing human populations are increasingly competing with wildlife for limited resources and this can result in chronic human–wildlife conflict. In the Cape Peninsula, South Africa, chacma baboons Papio ursinus are habitual raiders of urban and rural areas, foraging on a variety of human-derived foods. Raiding behaviour is considered a threat to hu...

Animals that forage in groups have access to social information concerning the quality and location of food resources available. The degree to which individuals rely on social information over their own private information depends on a myriad of ecological and social factors. In general, where resources are patchy in space and/or time, individuals...

This study provides a morphological description of bone enlargement (hyperostosis) in ribbonfish Trichiurus lepturus. Of 146 fish examined, 52.7% showed hyperostosis in the neural and hemal spines. Morphometric shape analysis revealed two distinct hyperostosis shapes, likely reflecting different ontogeny and/or environmental conditions, which could...

Ocean acidification (OA)—caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2)—is thought to be a major threat to marine ecosystems and has been shown to induce behavioural alterations in fish. Here we show behavioural resilience to near-future OA in a commercially important migratory marine finfish, the European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax)....

Ocean acidification (OA)—caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2)—is thought to be a major threat to marine ecosystems and has been shown to induce behavioural alterations in fish. Here we show behavioural resilience to near-future OA in a commercially important migratory marine finfish, the European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax)....

Social density processes impact the activity and order of collective behaviours in a variety of biological systems. Much effort has been devoted to understanding how density of people affects collective human motion in the context of pedestrian flows. However, there is a distinct lack of empirical data investigating the effects of social density on...

How an animal moves through its environment directly impacts its survival, reproduction, and thus biological fitness. A basic measure describing how an individual (or group) travels through its environment is Day Path Length (DPL), i.e., the distance travelled in a 24-hour period. Here, we investigate the ecological determinants of baboon (Papio sp...

Ocean acidification (OA), caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), is thought to be a major threat to marine ecosystems and has been shown to induce behavioural alterations in various species of fish. Recent investigations into the effects of near-future OA conditions on the behaviour of early life stages of marine fish have provide...

The effect of visible implant elastomer (VIE) tagging on the immediate physiological stress response was tested in female three-spined stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus, using non-invasive waterborne cortisol analysis. Post-tagging cortisol levels were significantly higher compared with pretreatment baseline concentrations; however, when comparing...

Predation plays a fundamental role in evolutionary processes, driving changes in prey morphology, physiology and behaviour. With organisms being increasingly exposed to rapid environmental changes, there is growing interest in understanding individual phenotypic plasticity in response to changes in predation pressure. Behavioural and physiological...

Consistent individual differences in behaviour observed within a population are termed 'personality'. Studies of personality typically test subjects in isolation, ignoring the potential effects of the social environment, which might restrict the expression of individual behaviour via conformity, or enhance it by facilitation. The Gouldian finch, Er...

Introduction Our ability to document insect preference for semiochemicals is pivotal in pest control as these agents can improve monitoring and be deployed within integrated pest management programmes for more efficacious control of pest species. However, methods used to date have drawbacks that limit their utility. We present and test a new concep...

There have been many investigations into consistent, individual differences in behavior (animal personalities), but rather less attention has been given to the possibility that individuals might differ consistently in their “cognitive style,” which refers to the way information is acquired, processed, stored, or acted on. Both personality and cogni...

Behavioural traits that co-vary across contexts or situations often reflect fundamental trade-offs which individuals experience in different contexts (e.g. fitness trade-offs between exploration and predation risk). Since males tend to experience greater variance in reproductive success than females, there may be considerable fitness benefits assoc...

Flocks of birds in flight represent a striking example of collective behaviour. Models of self-organization suggest that repeated interactions among individuals following simple rules can generate the complex patterns and coordinated movements exhibited by flocks. However, such models often assume that individuals are identical and interchangeable,...

The evolution of paternal care is rare in promiscuous mammals, where it is hampered by low paternity confidence. However, recent evidence indicates that juveniles whose fathers are present experience accelerated maturation in promiscuous baboon societies. The mechanisms mediating these paternal effects remain unclear. Here, we investigated whether...

Amanda sits waiting in a nail salon. She is on a day out with her two neighbors Bridget and Camille, who are already being serviced by different attendants. After observing Bridget’s body jolt several times, Amanda makes her way over to Camille’s attendant for her own service. By using a simple social cue, Amanda has likely saved herself a good bit...