BRC-BIO: Emergent dynamics and leadership in collective timing decisions

The ability of individuals in groups to make decisions (“collective decision making”) is critical to the survival and success of a wide variety of animal species, as well as many human endeavors, including governing bodies, corporations, and social media. Understanding what kinds of dynamics can lead to effective decision-making – and which lead to dysfunctional groups – is increasingly important as our society faces major, large-scale challenges in the near future.

One area that is particularly understudied, but ecologically and evolutionary important, is how groups making decisions about timing, such as when to begin a migration or when to flee from an approaching predator. In this project, a series of laboratory experiments will be conducted to study collective timing decisions in a species of schooling fish by leveraging existing technologies to automatically detect and track moving animals.

Guided by predictions from mathematical models, the project will ask how groups respond to a variety of timing stimuli; how leadership emerges within the group; and the rules that the animals follow to reach a consensus. The project will provide valuable training and mentorship for one Ph.D. student and three undergraduate students within a transdisciplinary research lab situated in one of the most diverse universities in the U.S.

The results of the project will provide important information about how vulnerable social animals may respond to predicted effects of climate change and may inform strategies to protect these species.

Collective decision-making is a ubiquitous strategy that biological systems at all scales exploit to improve their fitness. Most of the research to date has focused on groups deciding amongst options that are simultaneously available in the environment, such as discrete food patches or migration directions. However, equally important to an animal’s fitness are decisions about timing, such as when to initiate a migration or when to begin to flee from an approaching predator.

Timing decisions are fundamentally different from spatial decisions; for example, the ‘options’ (moments in time) present themselves sequentially and cannot be selected once that moment has passed. Because of this and other differences, mathematical models predict markedly different strategies and outcomes compared to spatial decision-making. To build research capacity in the lab, this project will develop two general-purpose tracking kits: one that is simple, fast, and cheap, and which can be further developed into an educational kit for use in undergraduate and high school classes; and one that uses peer-reviewed software packages that allow for markerless tracking of individuals over long time scales.

These two kits will be deployed to understand how social animals learn about one or more relevant times; how they respond to uncertainty in the timing of events; how leadership and collective memory forms; and what signaling mechanisms fish use to build consensus about a timing event.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.