Does diversity deliver? How variation in individual knowledge and behavioural traits impact on the performance of animal groups

你是否曾经和一群朋友（或者更糟糕的是，同事）在一个不熟悉的城市里站在一起，试图选择去哪家餐馆吃饭？我希望如此，但你还记得你是如何做出选择的吗？一直试图团结在一起，不要失去对方？有很多方法可以让你做出决定。你可能已经跟随了有目的地沿着大街出发的小组成员的决定，或者你们都可能同意去一家被当地人称为“城里最好的”的餐馆。这种情况在动物世界中同样常见。把“餐馆”换成“觅食地”，我们就可以描述几乎所有社会性动物在生活的每一天都面临的觅食决定。但这些都不是微不足道的决定;一系列连续的错误选择--将一个群体带到贫穷的觅食区或危险的栖息地--可能是致命的。当动物面临意想不到的危险或不断变化的环境时，这些决定变得更加困难，在我们快速变化的世界中，所有动物都越来越多地遇到这种情况。动物群体科普不确定性并在这种环境中表现良好的一种方法是利用彼此的专业知识或信息，或者让个体大胆尝试新的选择。例如，我们知道，汇总群体成员所拥有的信息可以增加群体的集体认知，这一概念在媒体上引起了广泛关注，并被称为“群体智慧”。更大和/或更多样化的群体也可能包含具有不同技能和经验的个人，这增加了一个群体解决给定任务的机会。但迄今为止，明确调查这种多样性对团队绩效影响的研究仅限于为经济利益而行动的人类团队，并产生了混合结果。在提议的奖学金中，我将使用实验和理论数据的组合来测试“多样性提供”在一个小组设置的假设，并问：是什么让一个成功的团队？为了回答这个问题，我将向大家介绍一种高度群居的淡水鱼，九棘鱼，它有一系列的问题，就像“哪家餐馆？”我在开头的句子中使用的例子。结合高度复杂的视频跟踪个别鱼的运动，觅食设备使用厨房鸡蛋定时器和实验室培养皿，我将探讨个体知识和个性的变化的作用。我将解决的问题包括：如果一个群体中最有见识的人也是群体中最大胆的人，那么这个群体是否会因为遵循这个大胆的人的选择而做出更准确的决定？如果一个群体是由大多数信息贫乏的大胆个体和少数信息丰富的害羞个体组成的，那么这个群体是否能够利用后者所拥有的信息？一个群体的信息或个性组成在他们不能就觅食地点达成一致并分裂之前必须有多大的不同？独特的实验设置也将使我能够衡量在这些不同的情况下对个体鱼类的实际好处（以食物量为单位）。所有这些实验都将在只有五条鱼的群体中进行，考虑到单独评估个体个性和训练鱼达到不同的“专业水平”所需的时间。然而，我将使用一系列基于我在这些实验中发现的计算机模拟来预测50或100个个体的鱼群的结果，然后我将在实验室中进行测试。总的来说，这个项目将是第一次尝试操纵群体内的信息和个性的分布，并将提供一个新的洞察社会动物在应对不确定性时的多样性功能。

Have you ever been stood with a group of friends (or worse, colleagues) in an unfamiliar city trying to choose which restaurant to dine at? I expect so, but do you remember how you made your choice, all the while trying to stick together and not lose one another? There are a number of ways you could have arrived at your decision. You may have followed the decision of the group member who set-off purposefully down the High Street, or you all may have agreed to go to the restaurant declared 'the best in town' by the person with local knowledge of the city. Such situations are just as common in the animal world. Swap 'restaurant' to 'foraging patch' and we have a description for the type of foraging decisions faced by almost all social animals, every day of their lives. But these are not trivial decisions; a number of consecutive bad choices-where a group are led to poor foraging areas, or risky habitats-can be fatal. Such decisions are made even more difficult where animals face unexpected dangers or an environment which is constantly changing, something all animals are increasingly encountering in our rapidly changing world. One way animal groups may cope with uncertainty-and perform well in such environments-is by drawing upon one another's particular expertise or information, or having individuals bold enough to try out new options. For instance, we know that summing information possessed by individual group-members can increase the collective cognition of groups, a concept which has attracted much attention in the media and been termed 'the wisdom of crowds'. Larger and/or more diverse groups may also contain individuals with different skills and experiences, which increase the chances of a group solving a given task. But to date, studies that explicitly investigate the effect of such diversity on group performance have so far been restricted to human teams acting for financial gain, and have produced mixed results. In the proposed fellowship, I will use a combination of experimental and theoretical data to test the hypothesis that 'diversity delivers' in a group setting, and ask: What makes a winning team? To answer this question, I will present highly gregarious freshwater fish, the nine-spined stickleback, with a series of problems not unlike the 'which restaurant?' example I used in my opening sentences. Combining highly sophisticated video tracking of individual fishes movements, with foraging devices made using kitchen egg-timers and laboratory petri dishes, I will explore the role of variability in individual knowledge and personality. Questions I will tackle will include: If the most informed individual in a group is also the boldest in the group, does the group make more accurate decisions as a consequence of following this bold individual's choices? If a group is composed of a majority of poorly informed bold individuals and a minority of well-informed shy individuals, is the group able to utilise the information possessed by the latter? How different does a groups information or personality composition have to be before they cannot agree on a place to forage, and split up? The unique experimental set-up proposed will also allow me to measure the actual benefit to individual fish (in terms of amount of food eaten) in these different contexts. All of these experiments will take place with groups of just five fish, given the time needed to individually assess individual personality and train fish to different levels of 'expertise'. However, I will then use a series of computer simulations based on what I find in these experiments to make predictions about the outcome where shoals of fifty or a hundred individuals are concerned, which I will then test in the laboratory. Overall, this project will be the first attempt to manipulate the distribution of both information and personality within groups, and will provide a new insight into the function of diversity for social animals when coping with uncertainty.