In most vertebrates, social play among peers is considered essential for behavioral development. Yet in solitary species bearing single offspring, ...

Large networks are particularly beneficial to researchers in under-represented groups.

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Humans aren’t the only ones to preempt conflict.

Humans aren’t the only ones to preempt conflict.

Faced with anthropogenic change, animals now encounter challenges different from their evolutionary past. To cope with such challenges, animals may use social information about others' affective stat...

Over the last year, our lab has been developing a policy on AI use. To do this, we did three main things: We read a lot of academic publications and tech news. We set up an #ai channel on our la...

Intergroup conflict is a powerful selective force throughout the animal kingdom. While research has traditionally focused on actions during and after contests, animals also exhibit behavioural flexibility in anticipation of potential intergroup encounters. Synthesising findings from diverse taxa, we describe how social species adjust pre-emptive information gathering, resource use, cohesion, synchrony, and intragroup interactions across a heterogeneous ‘landscape of intergroup conflict’. We show how variation in threat level, driven by spatial context, rival characteristics, and individual motivation, affects these behaviours, and how balancing sensed information and memories of past interactions underlies associated decision-making. Testing the consequences of intergroup pre-emptive behaviour using experimental, technological, and analytical advances will develop understanding of its role in socio-cognitive evolution, population dynamics, and community structure.

Using 10 years of GPS data and behavioural observations, the authors show that wild dwarf mongooses pre-emptively alter their behaviours, including space use and sentinel calling, in relation to the l...