Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Animal vigilance is often investigated under a narrow set of scenarios, but this approach may overestimate its contribution to animal lives. A solution may be to sample all looking behaviours and investigate numerous competing hypotheses in a single analysis. In this study, using a wild group of habituated chacma baboons (Papio ursinus griseipes) as a model system, we implemented a framework for predicting the key drivers of looking by comparing the strength of a full array of biological hypotheses. This included methods for defining individual-specific social threat environments, quantifying individual tolerance to human observers, and incorporating predator resource selection functions. Although we found evidence supporting reactionary and within-group (social) vigilance hypotheses, risk factors did not predict looking with the greatest precision, suggesting vigilance was not a major component of the animals' behavioural patterns generally. Instead, whilst some behaviours constrain opportunities for looking, many shared compatibility with looking, alleviating the pressure to be pre-emptively vigilant for threats. Exploring looking patterns in a thorough multi-hypothesis framework should be feasible across a range of taxa, offering new insights into animal behaviour that could alter our concepts of fear ecology.
Source: Communications Biology
Authors: Andrew T. L. Allan, Laura R. LaBarge, Annie L. Bailey, Benjamin Jones, Zachary Mason, Thomas Pinfield, Felix Schröder, Alex Whitaker, Amy F. White, Henry Wilkinson, Russell A. Hill
Language: English
Topic: Primate Behavior and Ecology
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,890
OpenAlex ID: W4401504136