Cooperation in collective action: on the “hunt” for role specialization

In recent years, there have been groundbreaking advances in the kinds of information we can collect on moving animals: GPS collars are returning positional data with increasing temporal resolution and accuracy. Our project leverages these advances to collect fine-scale data on African lion (Panthera leo) collective movement and behaviour.

Our overarching aim is to develop a comprehensive understanding of cooperative hunting, which raises fundamental questions about the ways in which animals perceive and communicate information, the extent to which they actively coordinate with each other to achieve joint aims, and the emergence of role specialization in animal collectives. With advances in the field of remote tracking technology, we can collect simultaneous data on the behavioural interactions of the entire pride and monitor both short- and long-distance communication among pride mates and individual-level information on foraging efficiency.

By bringing new, remote tracking tools to bear on these long-standing questions, we will develop a quantitative understanding of group hunting and role specialization across a range of spatio-temporal scales: from the second-to-second decisions from which coordinated hunting behaviour emerges to the landscape-scale patterns of splitting and merging that determine subgroup composition and the availability of cooperation partners.

Simultaneously tracking the movement, behaviour, and communication of entire lion prides across a range of ecological contexts and tying this data to the outcome of group hunts will generate unprecedented insights into the proximate drivers of variation in the dynamics of cooperative hunting behaviour. The overarching question we aim to address with this project is: When do we expect animal groups to move beyond simply hunting collectively to hunting collaboratively, and under what circumstances do we expect the emergence of role specialization? We approach this by first updating classic theoretical modelling paradigms of cooperative hunting and then using empirical data from wild lions in multiple prides to map group hunting behaviour in detail across habitat types and heterogeneous groups.