Gabriella Gall

Humans may play a key role in providing small prey mammals spatial and temporal refuge from predators, but few studies have captured the heterogeneity of these effects across space and time. Global COVID‐19 lockdown restrictions offered a unique opportunity to investigate how a sudden change in human presence in a semi‐urban park impacted wildlife....

Physical grooming is often used to maintain social bonds in animal groups but the time available for grooming each group member may be limited. Vocal exchanges have been proposed to serve as a solution for sustaining social bonds without the need for physical proximity. To explore this possible social function of vocal exchanges, we examined the ef...

Group-living animals sleep together, yet most research treats sleep as an individual process. Here, we argue that social interactions during the sleep period contribute in important, but largely overlooked, ways to animal groups' social dynamics, while patterns of social interaction and the structure of social connections within animal groups play...

The soundscape experienced by animals early in life can affect their behaviour later in life. For birds, sounds experienced in the egg can influence how individuals learn to respond to specific calls post-hatching. However, how early acoustic experiences affect subsequent social behaviour remains unknown. Here, we investigate how exposure to matern...

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...

Bioacoustic research provides invaluable insights into the behavior, ecology, and conservation of animals. Most bioacoustic datasets consist of long recordings where events of interest, such as vocalizations, are exceedingly rare. Analyzing these datasets poses a monumental challenge to researchers, where deep learning techniques have emerged as a...

Groups of animals inhabit vastly different sensory worlds, or umwelten, which shape fundamental aspects of their behaviour. Yet the sensory ecology of species is rarely incorporated into the emerging field of collective behaviour, which studies the movements, population-level behaviours, and emergent properties of animal groups. Here, we review the...

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...

The efficiency of communication between animals is determined by the perception range of signals. With changes in the environment, signal transmission between a sender and a receiver can be influenced both directly, where the signal’s propagation quality itself is affected, and indirectly where the senders or receivers’ behaviour is impaired, impac...

Territoriality and stable home ranges are a common space‐use pattern among animals. These ranges provide its inhabitants with important resources and thus favourable territories are associated with an increased fitness. While the role of territory quality and changes of territory ownership have often been investigated, the changes of territorial bo...

Animal societies can be organised in multiple hierarchical tiers [1]. Such multilevel societies, where stable groups move together through the landscape, overlapping and associating preferentially with specific other groups, are thought to represent one of the most complex forms of social structure in vertebrates. For example, hamadryas baboons (Pa...

Group-living animals need to trade off the benefits and the costs of close proximity to conspecifics. Benefits can be increased, and costs reduced by preferentially choosing specific locations within a group best adjusted to an individual’s needs or by associating with specific group members and/or avoiding others. We investigated the spatial struc...

Social animal groups often make consensus decisions about when to return to a sleeping site after a day of foraging. These decisions can depend on extrinsic as well as intrinsic factors, and can range from unshared to shared. Here we investigated how decisions of meerkats, Suricata suricatta, to return to their burrows are coordinated, whether they...

Some animal species live in stable social groups and scientists have long wondered how such groups are organized in space and how these groups maintain cohesion and make decisions. Group living animals need to trade-off the costs and benefits of close proximity to many conspecifics. Benefits can be increased, and costs reduced by preferentially cho...

Group coordination, when ‘on the move’ or when visibility is low, is a challenge faced by many social living animals. While some animals manage to maintain cohesion solely through visual contact, the mechanism of group cohesion through other modes of communication, a necessity when visual contact is reduced, is not yet understood. Meerkats (Suricat...

Syphilis is considered as one of the most devastating sexually transmitted diseases in human history. Based on historical records, the "Böse Blattern" (German for "Evil Pocks") spread through Europe after 1495 and shared symptoms with what we know today as syphilis. Many cities took measures to protect their population. Here, transliterations of ar...

Multiple approaches exist to model patterns of space use across species, among them resource selection analysis, statistical home‐range modelling and mechanistic movement modelling. Mechanistic home‐range models combine the benefits of these approaches, describing emergent territorial patterns based on fine‐scale individual‐ or group‐movement rules...

Quarantine is one possible solution to limit the propagation of an emerging infectious disease. Typically, infected individuals are removed from the population by avoiding physical contact with healthy individuals. A key factor for the success of a quarantine strategy is the carrying capacity of the facility. This is often a known parameter, while...