For species trying to boost their chances of avoiding predation, it could be a classic case of ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know that matters,’ according to new research.
For species trying to boost their chances of avoiding predation, it could be a classic case of ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know that matters,’ according to new research.
Seeing groups of different wild animals hanging out together on the plains of Africa is not unusual, but why and how these social groups form has puzzled ecologists for many years. For four years, a team of zoologists from the universities of Liverpool and York has been studying the formation of mixed groups of herbivore species on the African savannahs in Masai Mara, Kenya.
Their findings, published in Ecology Letters, show that herbivores seek out the company of species with the most informative alarm calls who can alert them to the threat of nearby predators.
“Often ecologists focus simply on the location of food and predators to understand how animals distribute themselves in nature, but we’ve shown that animals choose to live alongside other species who can provide them with valuable information, in this case about predation risk,” explains University of Liverpool researcher Dr Jakob Bro-Jorgensen.
Read more at University of Liverpool
Image: Mixed-species group of zebras, eland, wildebeest and impala in the Masai Mara (Credit: Jakob Bro-Jørgensen)
