ArticleNature communications2022
Raptors avoid the confusion effect by targeting fixed points in dense aerial prey aggregations.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 17 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
- Scalable nanofocusing heterojunctions for raptor-inspired on-chip vision perception.Science advances · 2026Article
- Pigeon-Inspired Depth-Reasoning-Driven Decision Framework for Autonomous Traversal Flight of Quadrotors in Unmapped 3D Spaces.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Controlling noisy herds: Temporal network restructuring improves control of indecisive collectives.Science advances · 2026Article
- Perception of motion salience shapes the emergence of collective motions.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Guppies in large groups cooperate more frequently in an experimental test of the group size paradox.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Gap selection and steering during obstacle avoidance in pigeons.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Raptors avoid the confusion effect by targeting fixed points in dense aerial prey aggregations.Nature communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Collective behaviours are widely assumed to confuse predators, but empirical support for a confusion effect is often lacking, and its importance must depend on the predator's targeting mechanism. Here we show that Swainson's Hawks Buteo swainsoni and other raptors attacking swarming Mexican Free-tailed Bats Tadarida brasiliensis steer by turning towards a fixed point in space within the swarm, rather than by using closed-loop pursuit of any one individual. Any prey with which the predator is on a collision course will appear to remain on a constant bearing, so target selection emerges naturally from the geometry of a collision. Our results show how predators can simplify the demands on their sensory system by decoupling steering from target acquisition when capturing prey from a dense swarm. We anticipate that the same tactic will be used against flocks and schools across a wide range of taxa, in which case a confusion effect is paradoxically more likely to occur in attacks on sparse groups, for which steering and target acquisition cannot be decoupled.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.