Choosing suitable sleeping sites is a common challenge faced by animals across a range of taxa, with important implications for the space usage patterns of individuals, groups, and ultimately populations. A range of factors ...

During group movements, many socially living and group-foraging animals produce contact calls. Contact calls typically function to coordinate and maintain cohesion among group members by providing receivers with information ...

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 ...

In the majority of mammals, gestation length is relatively consistent and seldom varies by more than 3%. In a few species, females can adjust gestation length by delaying the development of the embryo after implantation. ...

In many social species, both the acquisition of dominance and the duration that individuals maintain their status are important determinants of breeding tenure and lifetime reproductive success. However, few studies have ...

To maximise foraging opportunities while simultaneously avoiding predation, group-living animals can obtain personal information on food availability and predation risk and/or rely on social information provided by group ...

Inter-individual differences in gut microbiota composition are hypothesized to generate variation in host fitness—a premise for the evolution of host–gut microbe symbioses. However, recent evidence suggests that gut microbial ...

It is well established that animal vocalizations can encode information regarding a sender's identity, sex, age, body size, social rank and group membership. However, the association between physiological parameters, ...

1. Researchers studying mammals have frequently interpreted earlier or faster rates of ageing in males as resulting from polygyny and the associated higher costs of reproductive competition. 2. Yet, few studies conducted ...

Investigations of collective movement and animal communication have often followed distinct, though complementary, trajectories. Both subfields are deeply concerned with how information flows between individuals and shapes ...