A workflow of open-source tools for drone-based photogrammetry of marine megafauna.

Drones have revolutionized researchers' ability to obtain morphological data on megafauna, particularly cetaceans. The last decade has seen a surge in studies using drones to distinguish morphological differences among populations, calculate energetic reserves and body condition, and identify decreasing body sizes over generations. However, standardized workflows are needed to guide data collection, post-processing, and incorporation of measurement uncertainty, thereby ensuring that measurements are comparable within and across studies.

Integrating cultural dimensions in sperm whale () conservation: threats, challenges and solutions.

Culture-socially transmitted behaviours shared within a community-can influence animal populations' structure, vulnerability and resilience. Clans of sperm whales in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) exemplify the profound influence of culture on these dynamics and highlight the challenges of accounting for culture in conservation efforts. Globally, sperm whales are classified as vulnerable, and the ETP sperm whale population has struggled to reach a positive growth rate.

Ecology and conservation of socially learned foraging tactics in odontocetes.

Culture-group-typical behaviour shared by community members that rely on socially learned and transmitted information-can drive animal adaptations to local environments and thus has the potential of generating specialized behavioural tactics to solve fundamental life challenges, including capturing prey. However, as human activities rapidly change the world in unprecedented ways, animal foraging cultures may no longer represent optimal solutions to local environments. Odontocetes (toothed whales, dolphins and porpoises) are of particular concern because they rely on learned, specialized foraging tactics in habitats highly affected by human activities.

Aerial urination suggests undescribed sensory modality and social function in river dolphins.

Scent marking through urine spraying is known to aid mate selection, territory marking and chemical communication in terrestrial, but not in aquatic mammals. We quantify an unusual aerial urination behaviour in botos (Inia geoffrensis) and discuss its potential functions. Between 2014 and 2018, we conducted land-based behavioural surveys on wild botos in central Brazil, recording the sequence, duration and social context of aerial urination.

Foraging synchrony drives resilience in human-dolphin mutualism.

Interactions between humans and nature have profound consequences, which rarely are mutually beneficial. Further, behavioral and environmental changes can turn human-wildlife cooperative interactions into conflicts, threatening their continued existence. By tracking fine-scale behavioral interactions between artisanal fishers and wild dolphins targeting migratory mullets, we reveal that foraging synchrony is key to benefiting both predators.

Safeguarding human-wildlife cooperation.

Human-wildlife cooperation occurs when humans and free-living wild animals actively coordinate their behavior to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome. These interactions provide important benefits to both the human and wildlife communities involved, have wider impacts on the local ecosystem, and represent a unique intersection of human and animal cultures. The remaining active forms are human-honeyguide and human-dolphin cooperation, but these are at risk of joining several inactive forms (including human-wolf and human-orca cooperation).

Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures.

Culture, a pillar of the remarkable ecological success of humans, is increasingly recognized as a powerful force structuring nonhuman animal populations. A key gap between these two types of culture is quantitative evidence of symbolic markers-seemingly arbitrary traits that function as reliable indicators of cultural group membership to conspecifics. Using acoustic data collected from 23 Pacific Ocean locations, we provide quantitative evidence that certain sperm whale acoustic signals exhibit spatial patterns consistent with a symbolic marker function.

Deep learning with self-supervision and uncertainty regularization to count fish in underwater images.

Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently.

The role of habitat configuration in shaping animal population processes: a framework to generate quantitative predictions.

By shaping where individuals move, habitat configuration can fundamentally structure animal populations. Yet, we currently lack a framework for generating quantitative predictions about the role of habitat configuration in modulating population outcomes. To address this gap, we propose a modelling framework inspired by studies using networks to characterize habitat connectivity.

Social network architecture and the tempo of cumulative cultural evolution.

The ability to build upon previous knowledge-cumulative cultural evolution-is a hallmark of human societies. While cumulative cultural evolution depends on the interaction between social systems, cognition and the environment, there is increasing evidence that cumulative cultural evolution is facilitated by larger and more structured societies. However, such effects may be interlinked with patterns of social wiring, thus the relative importance of social network architecture as an additional factor shaping cumulative cultural evolution remains unclear.

The importance of individual-to-society feedbacks in animal ecology and evolution.

The social decisions that individuals make-who to interact with and how frequently-give rise to social structure. The resulting social structure then determines how individuals interact with their surroundings-resources and risks, pathogens and predators, competitors and cooperators. However, despite intensive research on (a) how individuals make social decisions and (b) how social structure shapes social processes (e.

Multilevel Organisation of Animal Sociality.

Multilevel societies (MLSs), stable nuclear social units within a larger collective encompassing multiple nested social levels, occur in several mammalian lineages. Their architectural complexity and size impose specific demands on their members requiring adaptive solutions in multiple domains. The functional significance of MLSs lies in their members being equipped to reap the benefits of multiple group sizes.

The ability of artisanal fishers to recognize the dolphins they cooperate with.

Background: Human-animal interactions with mutual benefits in the wild are rare. Such positive interactions seem to require an intricate knowledge from the human side on the animals' behavior and their habitat. In southern Brazil, dolphins and human net-casting fishers have specialized in a cooperative foraging, in which fishers report being able to identify and name dolphins.

Social Barriers in Ecological Landscapes: The Social Resistance Hypothesis.

Across animal societies, individuals invest time and energy in social interactions. The social landscape that emerges from these interactions can then generate barriers that limit the ability of individuals to disperse to, and reproduce in, groups or populations. Therefore, social barriers can contribute to the difference between the physical capacity for movement through the habitat and subsequent gene flow.

Causes and consequences of female centrality in cetacean societies.

Cetaceans are fully aquatic predatory mammals that have successfully colonized virtually all marine habitats. Their adaptation to these habitats, so radically different from those of their terrestrial ancestors, can give us comparative insights into the evolution of female roles and kinship in mammalian societies. We provide a review of the diversity of such roles across the Cetacea, which are unified by some key and apparently invariable life-history features.

Interaction paths promote module integration and network-level robustness of spliceosome to cascading effects.

The functionality of distinct types of protein networks depends on the patterns of protein-protein interactions. A problem to solve is understanding the fragility of protein networks to predict system malfunctioning due to mutations and other errors. Spectral graph theory provides tools to understand the structural and dynamical properties of a system based on the mathematical properties of matrices associated with the networks.

Simple foraging rules in competitive environments can generate socially structured populations.

Social vertebrates commonly form foraging groups whose members repeatedly interact with one another and are often genetically related. Many species also exhibit within-population specializations, which can range from preferences to forage in particular areas through to specializing on the type of prey they catch. However, within-population structure in foraging groups, behavioral homogeneity in foraging behavior, and relatedness could be outcomes of behavioral interactions rather than underlying drivers.

Nestedness across biological scales.

Biological networks pervade nature. They describe systems throughout all levels of biological organization, from molecules regulating metabolism to species interactions that shape ecosystem dynamics. The network thinking revealed recurrent organizational patterns in complex biological systems, such as the formation of semi-independent groups of connected elements (modularity) and non-random distributions of interactions among elements.

Cultural turnover among Galápagos sperm whales.

While populations may wax and wane, it is rare for an entire population to be replaced by a completely different set of individuals. We document the large-scale relocation of cultural groups of sperm whale off the Galápagos Islands, in which two sympatric vocal clans were entirely replaced by two different ones. Between 1985 and 1999, whales from two clans (called and ) defined by cultural dialects in coda vocalizations were repeatedly photo-identified off Galápagos.

Linking structure and function in food webs: maximization of different ecological functions generates distinct food web structures.

Trophic interactions are central to ecosystem functioning, but the link between food web structure and ecosystem functioning remains obscure. Regularities (i.e.

The network organization of protein interactions in the spliceosome is reproduced by the simple rules of food-web models.

The network structure of biological systems provides information on the underlying processes shaping their organization and dynamics. Here we examined the structure of the network depicting protein interactions within the spliceosome, the macromolecular complex responsible for splicing in eukaryotic cells. We show the interactions of less connected spliceosome proteins are nested subsets of the connections of the highly connected proteins.

Multilevel animal societies can emerge from cultural transmission.

Multilevel societies, containing hierarchically nested social levels, are remarkable social structures whose origins are unclear. The social relationships of sperm whales are organized in a multilevel society with an upper level composed of clans of individuals communicating using similar patterns of clicks (codas). Using agent-based models informed by an 18-year empirical study, we show that clans are unlikely products of stochastic processes (genetic or cultural drift) but likely originate from cultural transmission via biased social learning of codas.

The missing metric: quantifying contributions of reviewers.

The number of contributing reviewers often outnumbers the authors of publications. This has led to apathy towards reviewing and the conclusion that the peer-review system is broken. Given the trade-offs between submitting and reviewing manuscripts, reviewers and authors naturally want visibility for their efforts.

The interplay between social networks and culture: theoretically and among whales and dolphins.

Culture is increasingly being understood as a driver of mammalian phenotypes. Defined as group-specific behaviour transmitted by social learning, culture is shaped by social structure. However, culture can itself affect social structure if individuals preferentially interact with others whose behaviour is similar, or cultural symbols are used to mark groups.