ArticleScientific reports2021
Aerial drone observations identified a multilevel society in feral horses.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Close encounters of the friendly kind: pacific between-group interactions in primates.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Social and spatial drivers of the multitiered structure of zebra finch social networks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Why is mutual grooming rare despite its function? A hypothesis for cognitive constraints.Biology letters · 2025Article
- The role of space availability and affiliation in shaping equine social distances and dynamics.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Identifying Novel Emotions and Wellbeing of Horses from Videos Through Unsupervised Learning.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Horses are worthy of care: Horse sector participants' attitudes towards animal sentience, welfare, and well-being.Animal welfare (South Mimms, England) · 2025Article
- WildDrone: autonomous drone technology for monitoring wildlife populations.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2025Article
- Article
- Oxytocin homogenizes horse group organization.iScience · 2024Article
- Video Ethogram of Equine Social Behaviour.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Editorial: Recent Advances in Animal Cognition and Ethology.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Fine-scale collective movements reveal present, past and future dynamics of a multilevel society in Przewalski's horses.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Drone Observation for the Quantitative Study of Complex Multilevel Societies.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Equine Social Behaviour: Love, War and Tolerance.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Tend and Befriend in Horses: Partner Preferences, Lateralization, and Contextualization of Allogrooming in Two Socially Stable Herds of Quarter Horse Mares.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Garrano Horses Perceive Letters of the Alphabet on a Touchscreen System: A Pilot Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Flexible group cohesion and coordination, but robust leader-follower roles, in a wild social primate using urban space.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The study of non-human multilevel societies can give us insights into how group-level relationships function and are maintained in a social system, but their mechanisms are still poorly understood. The aim of this study was to apply spatial association data obtained from drones to verify the presence of a multilevel structure in a feral horse society. We took aerial photos of individuals that appeared in pre-fixed areas and collected positional data. The threshold distance of the association was defined based on the distribution pattern of the inter-individual distance. The association rates of individuals showed bimodality, suggesting the presence of small social organizations or "units". Inter-unit distances were significantly smaller than those in randomly replaced data, which showed that units associate to form a higher-level social organization or "herd". Moreover, this herd had a structure where large mixed-sex units were more likely to occupy the center than small mixed-sex units and all-male-units, which were instead on the periphery. These three pieces of evidence regarding the existence of units, unit association, and stable positioning among units strongly indicated a multilevel structure in horse society. The present study contributes to understanding the functions and mechanisms of multilevel societies through comparisons with other social indices and models as well as cross-species comparisons in future studies.
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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.