Colin R. Twomey

TL;DR: By studying these interaction networks, this work reveals the (complex, fractional) nature of social contagion and establishes that individuals with relatively few, but strongly connected, neighbors are both most socially influential and most susceptible to social influence.

TL;DR: This work considers individual movement decisions to be based explicitly on the sensory information available to the organism, and finds that structural properties of visual interaction networks differ markedly from those of metric and topological counterparts, suggesting that previous assumptions may not appropriately reflect information flow in animal groups.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that risk is predominantly encoded in the physical structure of groups, which individuals modulate in a way that augments or dampens behavioral cascades, and that in group-living species individual fitness can depend strongly on coupling between scales of behavioral organization.

TL;DR: The importance of the communication strategy employed decreases with increasing search effort and stronger local search, and that the relative effectiveness of one communication strategy versus another changes with the addition of local search.

TL;DR: An automated system to present visual threat stimuli to mixed-species groups of foraging fish in a coral reef is developed, showing that escape decisions are governed by a conserved set of decision-making rules that transform sensory input into evasive actions.