What is it about?
Social copying has evolved through the myriad of life histories of all social organisms, from bacteria to humans. This is especially true when social animals have to make decisions under adverse conditions, i.e. when the environment is progressively deteriorating. One of those decisions involves dispersal to other places where the perturbation is absent or is less severe. Dispersal may occur abruptly, once a threshold of individuals emigrating has trespassed, which causes a tipping point due to social copying. Populations may collapse due to this runaway dispersal, and this is what we found in our study on a social bird.
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Photo by Barth Bailey on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our findings relate simple behavioural rules to the dynamics of populations. Results may apply to other systems in which a press perturbation, such as the arrival of an invasive predator or warfare in humans, generates sudden population collapses.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a great pleasure as is the culmination of a long-term study that started four decades ago on an ecological system I have been deeply involved. Besides, it gave me the opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary group of outstanding collaborators. I am fascinated by how such a simple mechanism of social copying has been selected by evolutionary forces to generate population collapses, also in humans. More than anything else, and if nothing else, I hope you find this article thought-provoking.
Daniel Oro
CEAB (CSIC)
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Social copying drives a tipping point for nonlinear population collapse, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2214055120.
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