Behavioral sequences across multiple animal species in the wild share common structural features

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Minasandra, Pranav; Grout, Emily M.; Brock, Katrina; Crofoot, Margaret C.; Demartsev, Vlad; Gersick, Andrew S.; Hirsch, Ben T.; Holekamp, Kay E.; Johnson-Ulrich, Lily; Nayak, Amlan; Ortega, Josue; Roch, Marie A.; Strauss, Eli D.; Strandburg-Peshkin, Ariana
• 署名单位: Max Planck Society; University of Konstanz; Max Planck Society; University of Konstanz; Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute; Princeton University; James Cook University; Michigan State University; Michigan State University; University of Zurich; Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER) - Mohali; California State University System; San Diego State University
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-14537
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2503962122
• 发表日期: 2025-05-15
• 关键词: time budget; patterns; predictability; chimpanzees; MOVEMENT; DYNAMICS; meerkats; nasua; size; diet

摘要

Animal behavior can be decomposed into a sequence of discrete activity bouts over time. Analyzing the statistical structure of such behavioral sequences can provide insights into the drivers of behavioral decisions. Laboratory studies, predominantly in invertebrates, have suggested that behavioral sequences exhibit multiple timescales and long-range memory, but whether these results can be generalized to other taxa and to animals natural settings remains unclear. By analyzing accelerometer-inferred predictions behavioral states in three species of social mammals (meerkats, white-nosed coatis, and spotted hyenas) in the wild, we found surprisingly consistent structuring behavioral sequences across all behavioral states, all individuals, and all study species. Behavioral bouts were characterized by decreasing hazard functions, wherein the longer a behavioral bout had progressed, the less likely it was to end within the next instant. The predictability of an animal's future behavioral state as a function of its present state always decreased as a truncated power-law for predictions made farther into the future, with very similar estimates for the power law exponent across all species. Finally, the distributions of bout durations were also heavy-tailed. Why such shared structural principles emerge remains unknown, and we explore multiple plausible explanations, including environmental nonstationarity, behavioral self-reinforcement, and the hierarchical nature of behavior. The existence of highly consistent patterns in behavioral sequences across our study species suggests that these phenomena could be widespread in nature, and points to the existence of fundamental properties behavioral dynamics that could drive such convergent patterns.