Flamingos, elephants, killer whales and giraffes
This month, I am reminded that a year ago I was attending a conference in Germany that centred on social relationships within groups of animals of different species. What do these social relationships mean for the individuals within a group? How do we study them? I’ve also just presented some of my PhD work at the annual BIAZA Research Symposium that occurs every summer to showcase relevant zoo-based studies that are on-going throughout the UK and beyond. There were some very interesting social behaviour topics here too.
Like the friends and family that you keep in touch with, and interactions with a wider social network such as through work colleagues or via those sites that you can tweet from or post updates on (you know the ones!), animals also invest time and energy differently based on who they are interacting with. We can see similar patterns of association and interaction between human and non-human animals (don’t forget that you’re 99% chimpanzee after all!) and these associations help make each individual’s life easier, less stressful and happier overall.
[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K0d3alxAm0']
Who do I have a bath with? Greater flamingos at WWT Slimbridge washing their feathers. Birds that “like” each other will generally perform the same behaviour at the same time.
So why the range of species in this blog post? Well people know that flamingos live in groups. And that you can see many hundreds, thousands and even millions of birds all together in one flock. But being in a group and having relationships within that group are different. Think about the saying that a crowd can be a really lonely place… if you’re all milling around together you’re not friends. It is the networks between birds in the group that are really interesting to look at and that will explain why the group exists at all.
Yesterday, I visited the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science at the University of Nottingham to listen to a visiting scientist from Sri Lanka talk about her work on elephants. About as far away from flamingos as possible you might think? Well not quite. Relationships between individual animals in an elephant herd helps that herd grow, thrive and be successful; these relationships can be drawn / mapped / illustrated in the same way that I am doing with the flamingos at WWT Slimbridge. What I found especially fascinating about this work on elephants is that whilst we have assumed for many years that African and Asian elephants have the same social grouping, actually Asian elephants are much more flexible in their associations than their African cousins (who have REALLY strong best friends). Again, just like the flamingos. Some flocks of some species show strong bonds. Others, not so much.
And as for the giraffes and killer whales? Well work on these species also shows similarities to what I observe in the flamingos. Scientists at the University of Exeter have shown that female killer whales can live for an exceptionally long time and invest a great deal in their offspring. Flamingos live for, well…, you tell me! We still don’t know for how long exactly. But it is many, many, many, many decades. Flamingos also invest a lot in breeding and have a low reproductive output (they don’t have that many chicks over their lifetime). Killer whales also live in specific highly-connected social groups. It seems that these social groups make the lives of the whales within them ”better” in the longer-term. Something that could be the case for flamingos too.
[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D4ASh-Bj4I']
Friends are important for making babies? Is this flock of Andean flamingos brought together because of a need to breed or because they like each other?
And as for the giraffe, well like the flamingos there is much that we don’t know about their behaviour. The social groups that giraffe occur in have come under much scrutiny of late. Older books will tell you that giraffe don’t have “friends”. They wander around with no fixed herd structure. We’re not sure about flamingo flocks either. Why do they get so big? Because they like company? Or because they feed in the same place? New research on giraffe shows that actually they DO have friends and they like to hang around with animals they are familiar with. Maybe we humans have trouble seeing the world through the eyes of a different species. After all, if you were seventeen feet tall and could see over a mile or so, maybe your friends are a lot nearer to you than a human observer can possibly comprehend…
