One moment a herd of goats grinds around and looks casually through the shrubbery. Next, they pull long ears and stare their wide golden eyes as they purposefully jog and pick up speed as if they seem to be chasing attentively to a specific destination. They display behaviors that scientists have long watched to herd, breed and teach animals from baboons to fish.
It almost seems as if the goats cast their votes and together decided which way to go.
It is a matter of permanent importance how creatures in the animal kingdom come to a decision together. Among some species, individuals do weigh. Members of meerkat troops call and African wild dogs sneeze before the group moves, and they will only leave when enough individuals have had their say.
It has even been said that African buffalo agree with their movements, while animals show themselves the way they want to go, and that the herd chooses the average of all their directions.
However, it is difficult for a human observer to distinguish the difference between raids directed by silent voices and animals where animals copy, just as their closest compatriots do, such as the fish of the school. Using collars equipped with GPS and other sensors, biologists watched a small herd of Namibian goats to see if their behavior suggested some tactic. In an article published on Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, they report that the goats apparently do not vote.
If animals decide ahead of time which way, there should be a delay between when the majority orients them in the direction of the direction and when they leave, said Andrew King, who studies animal behavior at Swansea University in Wales and a author is. of the new paper. But it can be difficult for researchers to pinpoint the moments that matter.
“If you just sat in the field with a notebook, you could not do it because you do not know when they will leave,” he said.
He and his colleagues have developed collars that contain GPS equipment, as well as accelerometers and magnetometers that track which side animals face, when they start moving together and where they end up. They put the collars on 16 tame goats in the Tsaobis Nature Park in Namibia and collected data while wandering around over ten days. With this information, they can return to just before the group leaves a given place and determine what moment they turn to look at their destination.
When voting, the goats will orient themselves before the movement begins. A majority can get the direction in which they eventually move, or the direction can be an average of their positions. In each situation there will be a delay before the goats react to the decision.
Instead, the researchers saw that the goats did not even face their destination. This implies that one goat would start moving, its nearest neighbors would turn to follow it, and their nearest neighbors would do the same, a behavior the researchers call copying. This meant that the goats’ orientation before an invasion did not predict which way they would go.
The researchers also built a computer model to simulate what the goats’ movement would look like if they voted against copying only. Some virtual goat herds were programmed to copy their neighbors, while others voted with their positions. The researchers found that what the goats did in real life looked much more like the herd herds, suggesting that the animals had nothing more to do than mimic their companions to move as a group.
Behaviors that emerge from very simple rules can be surprisingly complex. Goats may not have discussions – at least not as scientists have seen in this study – but that does not mean that their ways of moving together are not flexible or helpful. If more research confirms that they are moving through copying, it may indicate that imitating neighbors can often improve survival in a herd, as well as other good outcomes.
Dr. King said that if many unrelated species use this decision-making process instead of voting, “it probably means it’s a useful, adaptable way of making collective decisions. ‘