Vigilant pigeons
Motion capture technology sheds light on how flocks of pigeons detect and respond to predator attacks while foraging for food.
Most animals compromise between spending time foraging for food and other resources and keeping watch for approaching predators or other threats. Many are thought to address this trade-off by living in a group where they rely on the vigilance of others to free up more time for foraging. If one individual animal detects a threat, they alert the whole group so that every individual can respond. However, it remains unclear how individuals use vision to detect a threat and how they communicate the threat to the rest of the group.
Pigeons are a useful animal model to address this question because they tend to live in groups and their vision is well understood. A pit at the back of their eye called the fovea is responsible for building clear, detailed images of the centre of the field of vision. When pigeons attend to something of interest, they typically direct their gaze by moving their whole head instead of their eyes, making head orientation a good proxy for researchers to track where they are looking.
To better understand how pigeons detect potential threats and communicate them to the rest of the flock, Delacoux and Kano used motion capture technology to track the head movements of groups of pigeons. To encourage the pigeons to forage, grain was scattered in the centre of an enclosed room. A plastic sparrowhawk (representing a potential predator) would then emerge and move across the room before disappearing again.
Analysis of the imaging data revealed that pigeons use their fovea to spot predators. Animals looking around before the potential predator emerged directed their fovea towards it more quickly than pigeons that were eating. These pigeons also took flight more quickly, which likely triggered the rest of the group to follow.
Due to improvements in tracking technologies, these findings may help scientists understand in finer detail how animals in a group detect and respond to threats and other cues in their environment. The experimental approach by Delacoux and Kano could also be used to investigate how information is passed among groups of other animal species.
Originally published at https://elifesciences.org/digests/95549.
