Cooperation, Coordination, and Cognition in Fission-Fusion Societies

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As individuals need to coordinate their activities to benefit from group living, group decisions are essential for societies, especially if group members cooperate with each other. How animals make group decisions has important implications for our understanding of animal societies. Models show that shared (“democratic”) decisions outperform unshared (“despotic”) decisions, even if individuals disagree about actions. This is surprising as in most other contexts, differences in individual preferences lead to sex-, age-, or kin-specific behaviour. However, empirical studies testing the predictions of the theoretical models are only beginning to emerge. My aim is to study group decision-making in fission-fusion societies, where individuals can avoid decisions that are not in their interest. I will manipulate three factors that affect group decisionmaking, but which have not yet been studied in detail in wild vertebrates. Because bats live in fission-fusion societies that depend on group decisions, bats provide novel opportunities for this kind of research. I will focus on two bat species, for which I have long-term data on social and genetic colony structures. Combining field experiments with behavioural, genetic, demographic, and morphological data, including in vivo magnetic resonance imaging of brain structures, I aim to assess how bats that differ in their abilities, interests and personalities make group decisions.