On cold, dark winter mornings, small black crows known as jackdaws can be heard calling loudly to one another from their winter roosting spots before taking off simultaneously right around sunrise. Now, researchers who’ve studied their daily activities in unprecedented detail report evidence that these groups of hundreds of individuals rely on a “democratic” decision-making process to coordinate with one another and take to the skies all at once. The findings are reported in the recent issue of journal Current Biology. “Like humans, large animal groups can use decision-making processes to overcome their individual differences and reach a kind of ‘democratic’ consensus,” says Alex Thornton of the University of Exeter. Previous studies had investigated consensus decision-making in...
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