Living together: behavior and welfare in single and mixed species groups of capuchin (Cebus apella) and squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus)

2010 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Leonardi ◽  
Hannah M. Buchanan-Smith ◽  
Valérie Dufour ◽  
Charlotte MacDonald ◽  
Andrew Whiten
2006 ◽  
Vol 274 (1611) ◽  
pp. 827-832 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin R Tosh ◽  
Andrew L Jackson ◽  
Graeme D Ruxton

Individuals of many quite distantly related animal species find each other attractive and stay together for long periods in groups. We present a mechanism for mixed-species grouping in which individuals from different-looking prey species come together because the appearance of the mixed-species group is visually confusing to shared predators. Using an artificial neural network model of retinotopic mapping in predators, we train networks on random projections of single- and mixed-species prey groups and then test the ability of networks to reconstruct individual prey items from mixed-species groups in a retinotopic map. Over the majority of parameter space, cryptic prey items benefit from association with conspicuous prey because this particular visual combination worsens predator targeting of cryptic individuals. However, this benefit is not mutual as conspicuous prey tends to be targeted most poorly when in same-species groups. Many real mixed-species groups show the asymmetry in willingness to initiate and maintain the relationship predicted by our study. The agreement of model predictions with published empirical work, the efficacy of our modelling approach in previous studies, and the taxonomic ubiquity of retinotopic maps indicate that we may have uncovered an important, generic selective agent in the evolution of mixed-species grouping.


2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (5) ◽  
pp. 755-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja K. Kleinhappel ◽  
Oliver H. P. Burman ◽  
Elizabeth A. John ◽  
Anna Wilkinson ◽  
Thomas W. Pike

PLoS ONE ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. e56789 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felipe Dargent ◽  
Julián Torres-Dowdall ◽  
Marilyn E. Scott ◽  
Indar Ramnarine ◽  
Gregor F. Fussmann

Author(s):  
Eben Goodale ◽  
Guy Beauchamp ◽  
Graeme D. Ruxton

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Broly ◽  
Quentin Ectors ◽  
Geoffrey Decuyper ◽  
Stamatios C. Nicolis ◽  
Jean-Louis Deneubourg

Abstract How mixed-species groups perform collective behaviours provides unique insights into the mechanisms that drive social interactions. Herein, we followed the aggregation process of two isopod species under monospecific and heterospecific conditions at three population densities. Our experimental results show that the formation of both the monospecific and heterospecific groups responds to a similar threshold function. Furthermore, the two species contribute equally to the mixed-species aggregate growth and are not spatiotemporally segregated. However, we show that the cohesion is weaker and the probability of forming aggregations is lower in heterospecific groups than in monospecific populations. Thus, our results show that amplification processes are shared between species, but that the weighting given to conspecific and heterospecific information differs. We develop a theoretical model to test this hypothesis. The model reproduces our experimental data and shows that a relatively low level of inter-attractions between species is able to generate mixed-species aggregates. Moreover the greater the total population, the lower this parameter value is needed to observe aggregation in both species. This highlights the importance to study not only qualitatively but also quantitatively the heterospecific interactions in mixed-species groups. Finally, the patterns observed could be biologically relevant in favouring the association between species.


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