Damien R. Farine

University of Zurich | UZH · Institut für Evolutionsbiologie und Umweltwissenschaften

Helping kin or nonkin can provide direct fitness benefits, but helping kin also benefits indirect fitness. Why then should organisms invest in cooperative partnerships with nonkin, if kin relationships are available and more beneficial? One explanation is that a kin-limited support network is too small and risky. Even if additional weaker partnersh...

Null models are an important component of the social network analysis toolbox. However, their use in hypothesis testing is still not widespread. Furthermore, several different approaches for constructing null models exist, each with their relative strengths and weaknesses, and often testing different hypotheses. In this study, I highlight why null...

1.Animal social networks are descriptions of social structure which, aside from their intrinsic interest for understanding sociality, can have significant bearing on across many fields of biology. 2.Network analysis provides a flexible toolbox for testing a broad range of hypotheses, and for describing the social system of species or populations i...

Conflicts of interest about where to go and what to do are a primary challenge of group living. However, it remains unclear how consensus is achieved in stable groups with stratified social relationships. Tracking wild baboons with a high-resolution global positioning system and analyzing their movements relative to one another reveals that a proce...

Stress during early life can cause disease and cognitive impairment in humans and non-humans alike [1]. However, stress and other environmental factors can also program developmental pathways [2, 3]. We investigate whether differential exposure to developmental stress can drive divergent social learning strategies [4, 5] between siblings. In many s...

Social network structure plays a key role in shaping processes in animal populations. These networks often show distinct patterns in humans and other large mammals, with relationship strengths organized into different tiers. Here, we used continuous, fine-scale tracking of four large captive colonies of zebra finches ( Taeniopygia guttata ), reveal...

The stress response helps individuals cope with challenges, yet how individual stress levels shape group-level processes and the behaviour of other group members has rarely been explored. In social groups, stress responses can be buffered by others or transmitted to members that have not even experienced the stressor first-hand. Stress transmission...

Kin selection has been the main hypothesis explaining helping behaviour in cooperative breeders, with evidence being largely based on the observation that helpers tend to provide to related offspring. However, kin-biased help could conceal additional, mechanisms contributing to the maintenance of cooperation. Under pay-to-stay, group augmentation a...

Animal tracking has opened the door to address many fundamental questions in ecology and conservation. Whilst historically animals have been tracked as a means to understand their large‐scale movements, such as migration, there is now a greater focus on using tracking to study movements over smaller scales, individual variation in movement or how m...

Machine-learning (ML) is revolutionizing the study of ecology and evolution, but the performance of models (and their evaluation) is dependent on the quality of the training and validation data. Currently, we have standard metrics for evaluating model performance (e.g., precision, recall, F1), but these to some extent overlook the ultimate aim of a...

The structure of social networks fundamentally influences spreading dynamics. In general, the more contact between individuals, the more opportunity there is for the transmission of information or disease to take place. Yet, contact between individuals, and any resulting transmission events, are determined by a combination of spatial (where individ...

All animals exhibit some combination of spatial and social behaviours. A diversity of interactions occurs between such behaviours, producing emergent phenomena at the spatial–social interface. Untangling and interrogating these complex, intertwined processes can be vital for identifying the mechanisms, causes and consequences of behavioural variati...

Animal tracking has opened the door to address many fundamental questions in ecology and conservation. While historically animals have been tracked as a means to understand their large-scale movements, such as migration, there is now a greater focus on using tracking to study movements over smaller scales, individual variation in movement, or how m...

Deciding where to forage must not only account for variations in habitat quality but also where others might forage. Recent studies have suggested that when individuals remember recent foraging outcomes, negative frequency-dependent learning can allow them to avoid resources exploited by others (indirect competition). This process can drive the eme...

In various animal species conspecifics aggregate at sleeping sites. Such aggregations can act as information centres where individuals acquire up‐to‐date knowledge about their environment. In some species, communal sleeping sites comprise individuals from multiple groups, where each group maintains stable membership over time. We used GPS tracking...

High population density should drive individuals to more frequently share space and interact, producing better-connected spatial and social networks. Despite this widely-held assumption, it remains unconfirmed how local density generally drives individuals' positions within wild animal networks. We analysed 34 datasets of simultaneous spatial and s...

To benefit from group living, individuals need to maintain cohesion and coordinate their activities. Effective communication thus becomes critical, facilitating rapid coordination of behaviours and reducing consensus costs when group members have differing needs and information. In many bird and mammal species, collective decisions rely on acoustic...

Dominance hierarchies allow animals living in stable groups to limit the costs of fighting over access to resources. However, little is known about whether hierarchies are maintained in more open, fission-fusion societies, where individuals interact with large numbers of individuals. We recorded social associations and aggressive interactions in a...

Research Highlight: Mistrick, J., Veitch, J. S. M., Kitchen, S. M., Clague, S., Newman, B. C., Hall, R. J., Budischak, S. A., Forbes, K. M., & Craft, M. E. (2024). Effects of food supplementation and helminth removal on space use and spatial overlap in wild rodent populations. Journal of Animal Ecology. http://doi.org/10.1111/1365‐2656.14067. The s...

Cooperation may emerge from intrinsic factors such as social structure and extrinsic factors such as environmental conditions. Although these factors might reinforce or counteract each other, their interaction remains unexplored in animal populations. Studies on multilevel societies suggest a link between social structure, environmental conditions...

Deciding where to forage must not only account for variation in habitat quality, but also where others might forage. Recent studies have suggested that when individuals remember recent foraging outcomes, negative frequency-dependent learning can allow them to avoid resources exploited by others (indirect competition). This process can drive the eme...

The number and quality of social bonds can have major consequences for fitness. For example, in socially monogamous species with biparental care, pair bond quality has been linked to the latency to breed as well as the number and survival of offspring. Given these benefits, what mechanisms prevent some individuals from forming strong pair bonds? Ma...

The structure of social networks fundamentally influences spreading dynamics. In general, the more contact between individuals, the more opportunity there is for transmission to take place. Yet, contact between individuals, and any resulting transmission events, are determined by a combination of spatial (where individuals choose to move) and socia...

Early‐life experiences can drive subsequent variation in social behaviours, but how differences among individuals emerge remains unknown. We combined experimental manipulations with GPS‐tracking to investigate the pathways through which developmental conditions affect social network position during the early dispersal of wild red kites (Milvus milv...

Research Highlight: Ross, C. T., McElreath, R., & Redhead, D. (2023). Modelling animal network data in R using STRAND. Journal of Animal Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365‐2656.14021. One of the most important insights in ecology over the past decade has been that the social connections among animals affect a wide range of ecological and evoluti...

Shared-decision making is beneficial for the maintenance of group-living. However, little is known about whether consensus decision-making follows similar processes across different species. Addressing this question requires robust quantification of how individuals move relative to each other. Here we use high-resolution GPS-tracking of two vulturi...

Movement is a key part of life for both solitary and group-living animals. In solitary animals, the energetic costs of making large displacements can be mitigated by energetically efficient strategies-specifically faster, straighter movements. However, little is known about whether moving as part of a collective enhances or limits the ability for i...

When dispersing, individuals typically have to make large displacements. While previously thought to be costly, recent work has suggested that individuals can largely mitigate these costs by expressing distinct movement strategies-moving faster and straighter-during dispersal. Several studies have also found that individuals express differences in...

Forming collectives can generate substantial benefits, but much less is known about the costs that individuals incur in doing so. We simultaneously captured individual movement, within-group position, leadership, and heart rate for each member in a group of wild vulturine guineafowl. Individuals had significantly increased heart rates when moving c...

The structure of animal societies is a key determinant of many ecological and evolutionary processes. Yet, we know relatively little about the factors and mechanisms that underpin detailed social structure. Among other factors, social structure can be influenced by habitat configuration. By shaping animal movement decisions, heterogeneity in habita...

Dominance hierarchies are generally thought to form over time via memory of repeated interactions. However, dominance hierarchies are also occasionally reported in species with fission-fusion social dynamics, where individuals may encounter large numbers of individuals, leading to incomplete social information. It it has been alternatively proposed...

Agonistic and affiliative interactions with group members dictate individuals' access to resources, and investment in competing for resources is often traded off with other needs. For example, reproductive investment can reduce body condition and, thereby, an individual's ability to win future agonistic interactions. However, group members may also...

Vulturine guineafowl live together in large groups, and these groups form part of a large and complex society. Researchers in the ECOLBEH project are looking at how these animals deal with the challenges of living in such a society, and how doing so can help them survive the harsh Kenyan climate, as Prof Dr Damien Farine explains

Individuals show consistent between-individual behavioural variation when they interact with conspecifics or heterospecifics. Such patterns might underlie emergent group-specific behavioural patterns and between-group behavioural differences. However, little is known about (i) how social and non-social drivers (external drivers) shape group-level s...

Major climatic changes in conjunction with animal movement may be associated with the spread of parasites and their vectors into new populations, with potentially important consequences for population persistence. Parasites can evolve to adapt to unsuitable ecological conditions and take up refuge within new host species, with consequences for the...

Multilevel societies are formed when stable groups of individuals spatially overlap and associate preferentially with other groups, producing a hierarchical social structure.1 Once thought to be exclusive to humans and large mammals, these complex societies have recently been described in birds.2,3 However, it remains largely unclear what benefits...

How individuals’ prior experience and population evolutionary history shape emergent patterns in animal collectives remains a major gap in the study of collective behaviour. One reason for this is that the processes that can shape individual contributions to collective actions can happen over very different timescales from each other and from the c...

Interactions between humans and nature have profound consequences, which rarely are mutually beneficial. Further, behavioral and environmental changes can turn human-wildlife cooperative interactions into conflicts, threatening their continued existence. By tracking fine-scale behavioral interactions between artisanal fishers and wild dolphins targ...

Spatial and social behaviour are fundamental aspects of an animal's biology, and their social and spatial environments are indelibly linked through mutual causes and shared consequences. We define the ‘spatial–social interface’ as intersection of social and spatial aspects of individuals' phenotypes and environments. Behavioural variation at the sp...

Cooperative breeding is widely reported across the animal kingdom. In birds, it is hypothesised to be most common in altricial species (where chicks are dependent on parental care in the nest after hatching), with few described cases in precocial species (where chicks are more independent immediately after hatching). However, cooperative breeding m...

While many animals utilize socially transmitted information, there is still much to understand about how individuals form social networks and how these networks influence social information use. Here, we tested the hypothesis that food distribution and availability can influence social structure and social information transfer when discovering nove...

GPS‐based tracking is widely used for studying wild social animals. Much like traditional observational methods, using GPS devices requires making a number of decisions about sampling that can affect the robustness of a study's conclusions. For example, sampling fewer individuals per group across more distinct social groups may not be sufficient to...

Observing the behaviour of others is a cheap and effective way of acquiring up-to-date information about the environment. Further, an animal that changes its behaviour in response to acquiring social information effectively propagates that information forwards. Although the rules that govern how individual birds detect and respond to social cues ar...

Foraging innovations can give wild animals access to human-derived food sources¹. If these innovations spread, they can enable adaptive flexibility² but also lead to human-wildlife conflicts³. Examples include crop-raiding elephants⁴ and long-tailed macaques that steal items from people to trade them back for food⁵. Behavioural responses by humans...

Studying the social behaviour of small or cryptic species often relies on constructing networks from sparse point-based observations of individuals (e.g. live trapping data). A common approach assumes that individuals that have been detected sequentially in the same trapping location will also be more likely to have come into indirect and/or direct...

Parasites can impact the behavior of animals and alter the interplay with ecological factors in their environment. Studying the effects that parasites have on animals thus requires accurate estimates of infections in individuals. However, quantifying parasites can be challenging due to several factors. Laboratory techniques, physiological fluctuati...

Studying animal behavior as collective phenomena is a powerful tool for understanding social processes, including group coordination and decision-making. However, linking individual behavior during group decision-making to the preferences underlying those actions poses a considerable challenge. Optimal foraging theory, and specifically the marginal...

Revealing the consequences of social structure in animal societies is largely determined by our ability to accurately estimate functionally relevant patterns of social contact among individuals. To date, studies have predominantly built up social structure from dyadic connections. However, many associations or interactions can involve more than two...

The stress systems are powerful mediators between the organism's systemic dynamic equilibrium and changes in its environment beyond the level of anticipated fluctuations. Over- or under-activation of the stress systems' responses can impact an animal's health, survival and reproductive success. While physiological stress responses and their influen...

Understanding the dynamics of small-scale fisheries requires considering the diversity of behaviours and skills of fishers. Fishers may have different abilities and tactics that can translate into different fishing outcomes. Here, we investigate variation in fishing behaviours among traditional net-casting fishers that are assisted by wild dolphins...

Making a decision as a group requires not only choosing where to go but also when to go. A new study provides experimental evidence that, in jackdaws, vocalisations facilitate synchronous early morning departures from communal roosts.

Social contacts can facilitate the spread of both survival‐related information and infectious diseases, but little is known about how these processes combine to shape host and parasite evolution. Here, we use a theoretical model that captures both infection and information transmission processes to investigate how host sociality (contact effort) an...

Culturally transmitted communication signals – such as human language or bird song – can change over time through cultural drift, and the resulting dialects may consequently enhance the separation of populations. However, the emergence of song dialects has been considered unlikely when songs are highly individual-specific, as in the zebra finch (Ta...

The vast majority of interspecific interactions are competitive or exploitative. Yet, some positive interspecies interactions exist, where one (commensalism) or both (mutualism) species benefit. One such interaction is cleaning mutualisms, whereby a cleaner removes parasites from a client. In this note, we document the novel observation of a black‐...

Spatial and social behaviour are fundamental aspects of an animal’s biology, and the social and spatial environments are indelibly linked through mutual causes and shared consequences. Behavioural variation at the “spatial-social interface”, which we define as the intersection of social and spatial aspects of individuals’ phenotypes and environment...

In many animal societies, individuals differ consistently in their ability to win agonistic interactions, resulting in dominance hierarchies. These differences arise due to a range of factors that can influence individuals’ abilities to win agonistic interactions, spanning from genetically driven traits through to individuals’ recent interaction hi...

GPS-based tracking is a widely used automated data collection method for studying wild animals. Much like traditional observational methods, using GPS devices to study social animals requires making a number of decisions about sampling that can affect the robustness of a study's conclusions. For example, sampling fewer individuals per group across...

Dominance is important for access to resources. As dominance interactions are costly, individuals should be strategic in whom they interact with. One hypothesis is that individuals should direct costly interactions towards those closest in rank, as they have most to gain—in terms of attaining or maintaining dominance—from winning such interactions....

Multilevel societies (MLSs), where social levels are hierarchically nested within each other, are considered one of the most complex forms of animal societies. Although thought to mainly occurs in mammals, it is suggested that MLSs could be under-detected in birds. Here, we propose that the emergence of MLSs could be common in cooperatively breedin...

Recent well-documented cases of cultural evolution towards increasing efficiency in non-human animals have led some authors to propose that other animals are also capable of cumulative cultural evolution, where traits become more refined and/or complex over time. Yet few comparative examples exist of traits increasing in complexity, and experimenta...

Despite the ecological importance of pair bonding, the ontogeny of pair bond formation remains poorly understood. We capitalized on long-term high-resolution tracking of social interactions across replicated colonies of captive zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, to map the dynamics of social relationships prior to reproduction and to identify the...

Multilevel societies (MLSs), where social levels are hierarchically nested within each other, are considered one of the most complex forms of animal societies. Although thought to mainly occur in mammals, it is suggested that MLSs could be under-detected in birds. Here we propose that the emergence of MLSs could be common in cooperatively breeding...

Objective: The renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) plays a relevant role in regulating blood pressure and thus maintaining cardiovascular homeostasis. While it was recently shown that RAAS parameters are responsive to acute psychosocial stress, the psychobiological determinants of the acute stress-induced RAAS activation have not yet been...

Permutation tests are widely used to test null hypotheses with animal social network data, but suffer from high rates of type I and II error when the permutations do not properly simulate the intended null hypothesis. Two common types of permutations each have limitations. Pre‐network (or datastream) permutations can be used to control ‘nuisance ef...

Dispersal is a critical process that shapes the structure of wild animal populations. In species that form multi‐level societies, natal dispersal might be social (associating with a different social community while remaining near the natal area), spatial (moving away from the natal area while continuing to associate with the same community) or both...

Social animals face daily challenges to fulfil feeding, resting and social needs. In vervet monkeys, Chlorocebus pygerythrus, females are the core of the social group, in which relationships are mainly established and maintained through grooming. However, social relationships are not necessarily mutual or driven by the same interests. In a complex...

Background A challenge faced by animals living in groups with stable long-term membership is to effectively coordinate their actions and maintain cohesion. However, as seasonal conditions alter the distribution of resources across a landscape, they can change the priority of group members and require groups to adapt and respond collectively across...

The cover image is based on the Letter Efficient movement strategies mitigate the energetic cost of dispersal by James A. Klarevas‐Irby et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13763.

By shaping where individuals move, habitat configuration can fundamentally structure animal populations. Yet, we currently lack a framework for generating quantitative predictions about the role of habitat configuration in modulating population outcomes. To address this gap, we propose a modelling framework inspired by studies using networks to cha...

Evading predator attacks requires making rapid decisions. A new study has found that instead of moving towards others, as predicted by classical models of anti-predator behaviour, homing pigeons move away from their flock when faced with an imminent attack.

Dominance is important for access to resources. As dominance interactions are costly, individuals should be strategic in who they interact with. One hypothesis is that individuals should direct costly interactions towards those closest in rank, as they have most to gain--in terms of attaining or maintaining dominance--from winning such interactions...

Individuals differ in the quantity and quality of their associations with conspecifics. The resulting variation in the positions that individuals occupy within their social environment can affect several aspects of life history, including reproduction. While research increasingly shows how social factors can predict dyadic mating patterns (who will...

Social learning is a primary mechanism for information acquisition in social species. Despite many benefits, social learning may be disadvantageous when independent learning is more efficient. For example, searching independently may be more advantageous when food sources are ephemeral and unpredictable. Individual differences in cognitive abilitie...