ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Predators attacking virtual prey reveal the costs and benefits of leadership.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 73 citations in OpenAlex.
- Coevolutionary attack and avoidance strategies in predators and grouping prey.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- How volant seabirds benefit from sub-surface predators during multi-predator feeding aggregations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Behavioural response of prey to repeated attacks by non-coordinating predators.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Adaptive Significance of Tail-Flagging: A Test in European Rabbits (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- The evolution of democratic peace in animal societies.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Sailfish generate foraging opportunities for seabirds in multi-species predator aggregations.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Shoaling behaviour in response to turbidity in three-spined sticklebacks.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Multispecies collective waving behaviour in fish.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Dynamics of collective motion across time and species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Personality variation is eroded by simple social behaviours in collective foragers.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Lateral line morphology, sensory perception and collective behaviour in African cichlid fish.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Both prey and predator features predict the individual predation risk and survival of schooling prey.eLife · 2022Article
- Responsive robotic prey reveal how predators adapt to predictability in escape tactics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Leaders of war: modelling the evolution of conflict among heterogeneous groups.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Females prefer males producing a high-rate song with shorter timbal-stridulatory sound intervals in a cicada species.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Should I stay or should I go? How activity synchronization affects fission decisions.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Collective motion diminishes, but variation between groups emerges, through time in fish shoals.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- The measure of spatial position within groups that best predicts predation risk depends on group movement.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The Potential for Physiological Performance Curves to Shape Environmental Effects on Social Behavior.Frontiers in physiology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
A long-standing assumption in social behavior is that leadership incurs costs as well as benefits, and this tradeoff can result in diversified social roles in groups. The major cost of leadership in moving animal groups is assumed to be predation, with individuals leading from the front of groups being targeted more often by predators. Nevertheless, empirical evidence for this is limited, and experimental tests are entirely lacking. To avoid confounding effects associated with observational studies, we presented a simulation of virtual prey to real fish predators to directly assess the predation cost of leadership. Prey leading others are at greater risk than those in the middle of groups, confirming that any benefits of leading may be offset by predation costs. Importantly, however, followers confer a net safety benefit to leaders, as prey leading others were less likely to be attacked compared with solitary prey. We also find that the predators preferentially attacked when solitary individuals were more frequent, but this effect was relatively weak compared with the preference for attacking solitary prey during an attack. Using virtual prey, where the appearance and behavior of the prey can be manipulated and controlled exactly, we reveal a hierarchy of risk from solitary to leading to following social strategies. Our results suggest that goal-orientated individuals (i.e., potential leaders) are under selective pressure to maintain group cohesion, favoring effective leadership rather than group fragmentation. Our results have significant implications for understanding the evolution and maintenance of different social roles in groups.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.