Having a hierarchical social structure with just a few well-connected leaders enables pigeon flocks to navigate more accurately on the wing, new research shows.
Hierarchical organisation also enables flocks to cope better with navigation errors made by individual birds.
Researchers from Oxford University and the Zoological Society of London created 'virtual flocks' of homing pigeons to test how different social networks affect the navigation performance of these groups. The team's simulations looked at everything from no networks (all connections between individuals were of equal strength) to random networks (some connections were stronger than others but randomly distributed) to hierarchical networks with just a few well-connected individuals leading the way.
Having a hierarchical social structure with just a few well-connected leaders enables pigeon flocks to navigate more accurately on the wing, new research shows.
Hierarchical organisation also enables flocks to cope better with navigation errors made by individual birds.
Researchers from Oxford University and the Zoological Society of London created 'virtual flocks' of homing pigeons to test how different social networks affect the navigation performance of these groups. The team's simulations looked at everything from no networks (all connections between individuals were of equal strength) to random networks (some connections were stronger than others but randomly distributed) to hierarchical networks with just a few well-connected individuals leading the way.
Flocks in which each individual follows just a single other bird, allowing information to rapidly pass down this 'chain of command', perform best at navigating accurately to a desired location, the study suggests.
A report of the research is published this week in the Royal Society journal Interface.
The research was led by Dr Andrea Flack whilst she was at Oxford University's Department of Zoology: she is now at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany.
Dr Dora Biro of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, a co-author of the paper said: 'We'e previously shown – through high-resolution GPS tracking of bird flocks – that homing pigeons have structured hierarchical relationships where individuals form stable leader-follower pairs during flight. Our approach here was to model the process mathematically, examining different types of social structures and their effects on navigational performance.'
Lead author Dr Flack said: 'We modelled pigeon flocks aiming to reach a target – in real life, the birds' home loft – in which individuals behave according to a set of rules based on what we know from our homing experiments with real pigeons. To model the impact of different social structures, we varied how much 'attachment' there was between any given pair of individuals, and how the full set of these attachments were distributed within the group. We found that the different structures gave rise to different navigational accuracies by the groups.'
Pigeons flying image via Shutterstock.
Read more at University of Oxford.
