© Eduardo Sampaio
Strategic thinking, group leadership and planning is normally associated with a high level of intelligence and cognitive awareness of others in the group so the group can work efficiently to achieve a given objective.
So it will come as a surprise to those who cite these human abilities as evidence of human exceptionalism pointing to special creation as a species materially different o other species, that octopuses have been shown to exhibit the same skills when leading inter-species hunting groups consisting of themselves and one or more species of fish who collectively find hidden prey species which the octopus can flush out.
Unlike humans, however, leadership power in octopuses does not lead to despotism, as it often does with humans and octopuses show flexibility of roles, sometime letting one of the fish lead the group. However, there is evidence that octopuses control the dynamics within the group and enforce social hierarchies.
Unlike with human-led multi-species hunting groups which may include dogs and horses, where it is invariably a human who leads the group and who determines how the prey is shared if at all, with octopus-led groups, the octopus needs the cognitive skills and social awareness to understand the group dynamics and social structure across several species, but the prey is consumed by whoever catches it with no attempt to impose a precedence by the leader.
The objective is to capture the prey, not massage the ego of the leader.
These group hunting strategies allow goatfish to forage more effectively, taking advantage of teamwork to find hidden prey and exploit food resources in their habitats.
What can you tell me about group hunting strategies amongst goatfish? Goatfish, belonging to the family Mullidae, are known for their fascinating foraging behaviors, including cooperative hunting strategies. These fish have distinctive barbels (whisker-like appendages) on their chins, which they use to detect prey hidden in the sandy sea floor. While some species are solitary hunters, others engage in group hunting, which provides several advantages:This behaviour has just been reported, open access, in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution by a team of researchers led by experts from the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Their research is described in a University of Konstanz press release:
- Cooperative Foraging
Some species of goatfish have been observed working together in small groups to herd prey, such as small crustaceans, worms, or mollusks. By disturbing the sediment, the group flushes out hidden prey that individual fish might not be able to find as efficiently. This teamwork increases the chances of success for the entire group. Often, the fish spread out in a line or form a semicircle to corner or encircle prey, minimizing escape routes.- Mixed-Species Hunting
Goatfish are known to participate in mixed-species hunting, where they join other fish species to maximize prey detection. For instance, they may form temporary hunting alliances with other benthic feeders like wrasses or groupers. The goatfish stir up prey with their barbels, while the other species benefit from the disturbed environment, and in turn, goatfish might take advantage of prey missed by the others.- Schooling Behavior
In some cases, large schools of goatfish feed in unison, sifting through the sand or soft sediments together. This can be a form of opportunistic feeding where they cover large areas of the seafloor, increasing the likelihood of finding food.- Barbel Communication
Although not fully understood, goatfish may use their sensitive barbels for intraspecific communication during group hunts. The barbels, rich with taste buds and sensory cells, help them detect prey, but they may also play a role in signaling each other about food-rich areas.
Unlocking the secrets of multispecies hunting
Scientists have made extraordinary discoveries about how otherwise-solitary octopuses and various fish species coordinate their hunts: fish serve as guides, finding prey and flagging its location, and the octopus uses its flexible arms to capture the hidden prey. This research, led by experts from the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, unveils the remarkable interplay and functional dynamics within these multispecies hunting groups. Their findings, now published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, offer a glimpse into the complex world of interspecies collaboration and behaviour.
The diving gear is on, the cameras are ready – biologist Eduardo Sampaio and his colleagues are set to go. They dive in the Red Sea, scanning left and right underwater – and wonder: Where can an octopus hunting be found? Finally, they spot one. The team operates the two cameras they have with them, and station many more to collect data. Then, it’s time to wait. Months later, after analyzing more than 100 hours of film material from dives in Israel, Egypt, and Australia, Eduardo Sampaio is more than pleased with the footage. The two camera perspectives have enabled him to create a 3D view of the scene in the Red Sea – and provide him with novel insights into multispecies hunting.
Utilizing advanced 3D field-based tracking and field experiments, Eduardo Sampaio observed that multispecies groups display unique and composition-dependent properties.
In groups of Octopus cyanea and various fish species, social influence is not evenly distributed but rather hierarchically structured across multiple dimensions, reflecting specialized roles within the group.
Eduardo Sampaio, lead author
Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre (MARE)
Laboratório Marítimo da Guia
Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
And Department of Collective Behaviour
Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany
Notably, fish, particularly goatfish, are responsible for environmental exploration, dictating the group’s direction, while the octopus determines the timing and initiation of group movement.
In an intriguing display of ecological synergy, fish act as an extended sensorial system for octopuses. They are covering larger areas and enhancing prey detection efficiency.
This beneficial interaction enables fish to acquire otherwise unreachable prey, and octopuses to conserve energy by focusing on high-quality food sources, while exerting control and providing feedback within the group, highlighting the sophisticated dynamics of marine life collaboration.
Eduardo Sampaio
New perspective on leadership
Leadership in animal groups, be it fish, birds, or apes, is usually associated with driving the group forward. However, this study shows that leadership can emerge from both the stimulation and inhibition of movement in others, with the octopus acting as the main influencer of movement through inhibition. Moreover, the group's composition significantly influences individual investment and collective action, revealing exploitation by different group members. Such prompts partner control mechanisms, mainly by the octopus, that punches the exploiters, reinforcing its position as the de facto leader. These actions help the octopus to maintain the benefits it receives from collaborative partners.
This research demonstrates that the otherwise solitary Octopus cyanea exhibits remarkable social competence and cognitive flexibility, adapting its behaviour in response to the actions of different species.[In concrete terms for the hunting situation this means:] When the octopus catches the prey it also kills it. One item of prey is not divided, it is taken by whoever catches the prey first! However, because the interaction between the fish and octopus repeat several times during a hunt, prey is 'shared' in the sense that sometimes the octopus catches the prey, and other times fish catch the prey.
These results broaden our understanding of leadership and sociality, emphasizing the complexity and adaptability of social interactions in nature.
Eduardo Sampaio
Original paper:Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02525-2
These hunting groups can be impressively diverse and large: Here, Octopus cyanea is accompanied by two goldsaddle goatfish (Parupeneus cyclostomus), a blacktip grouper (Epinephelus fasciatus), a lyretail grouper (Variola louti), and a broomtail wrasse (Cheilinus lunulatus).© Eduardo Sampaio
The research shows that the Octopus cyanea exhibits remarkable social competence and cognitive flexibility. It adapts its behaviour in response to the actions of other species.© Eduardo Sampaio
Eduardo Sampaio dives into the Red Sea to study the hunting behaviour of octopuses. During his expedition, he and his colleagues collect over 100 hours of footage from dives not only in Israel but also in Egypt and Australia.© Marleen Franz
An octopus accompanied by fish.© Eduardo Sampaio
AbstractIt is quite clear from this study that octopuses possess exceptional leadership and cognitive abilities - qualities that are normally thought of a uniquely human and requiring high intelligence. They are aware of and manipulate the social dynamics and hierarchies not only within different species but between the different species. Although there are some other undoubtedly highly intelligent species, some of which, such as dolphins and orcas work together as organised groups, few, if any of them organised and manage multi-species groups to achieve an objective.
Collective behaviour, social interactions and leadership in animal groups are often driven by individual differences. However, most studies focus on same-species groups, in which individual variation is relatively low. Multispecies groups, however, entail interactions among highly divergent phenotypes, ranging from simple exploitative actions to complex coordinated networks. Here we studied hunting groups of otherwise-solitary Octopus cyanea and multiple fish species, to unravel hidden mechanisms of leadership and associated dynamics in functional nature and complexity, when divergence is maximized. Using three-dimensional field-based tracking and field experiments, we found that these groups exhibit complex functional dynamics and composition-dependent properties. Social influence is hierarchically distributed over multiscale dimensions representing role specializations: fish (particularly goatfish) drive environmental exploration, deciding where, while the octopus decides if, and when, the group moves. Thus, ‘classical leadership’ can be insufficient to describe complex heterogeneous systems, in which leadership instead can be driven by both stimulating and inhibiting movement. Furthermore, group composition altered individual investment and collective action, triggering partner control mechanisms (that is, punching) and benefits for the de facto leader, the octopus. This seemingly non-social invertebrate flexibly adapts to heterospecific actions, showing hallmarks of social competence and cognition. These findings expand our current understanding of what leadership is and what sociality is.
Main
Collective behaviour emerges from the network of interactions among individual parts. It is central to coordinated functioning across scales of organization, including physical1, cellular2 and social3,4 systems. Heterogeneity, driven by genetic4,5,6, physiological6,7 and informational4,5,8 differences among individuals, plays a vital role in explaining the functional complexity of collectives. We see the emergence of such complex behaviours in the division of labour among cells2 or insect societies3. The same functional dynamics also enable several alternatives of decision-making in groups, which can be placed over a despotic–democratic axis, that is, one individual leader or shared leadership9,10,11. Despite this, groups in which differences among system components may be expected to be greatest—multispecies animal groups—have received comparatively little attention.
Common across terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, multispecies groups are composed of individuals with species, and thus function-specific, characteristics linked to specialized strategies driven by divergent evolutionary histories12,13. Yet, the members of the group as a whole may exhibit a shared objective, such as during collective hunting. In general, groups of animals hunting together can increase the likelihood of acquiring information14 about prey locations15,16, potentially leading to division of roles and consequent role specialization17,18. Such is also true in the case of interspecific interactions, in which differently evolved hunting strategies can more easily lead to role specialization, as seen particularly in coordinated pairwise associations12,19. Thus, multispecies groups offer a unique opportunity to quantify how networks of highly heterogeneous behavioural phenotypes achieve complex coordinated action.
Despite having diverged at the vertebrate–invertebrate division ~550 million years ago (Ma)20, otherwise-solitary foraging octopuses can be accompanied by several fish with which they share a generalist diet (that is, feeding on smaller crustaceans, fish and molluscs)21,22. Octopuses typically forage by moving along the reef searching for hidden prey using their arms, either by probing into crevices or by fully enveloping corals or rocks in web-overs, a general strategy that has been termed ‘speculative hunting’23,24. Accompanying fish species possess different predation strategies that evolved according to their specific ecological niches, including active bottom-churning feeding, for example, long-barbel goatfish Parupeneus macronemus (hereafter ‘barbel goatfish’) and yellow and blue goldsaddle goatfish Parupeneus cyclostomus (hereafter ‘yellow goatfish’ and ‘blue goatfish’, respectively); stalking open water predation, for example, lyretail grouper Variola louti (hereafter ‘lyretail’); and sit-and-wait ambush predation, for example, blacktip grouper Epinephelus fasciatus (hereafter ‘blacktip’) (Fig. 1a, Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary Video 1).Octopus–fish hunting groups have been mostly considered as ‘nuclear–follower’ (or ‘producer–scrounger’) systems10,25, in which the octopus is the nucleus of the group as it stimulates and maintains group cohesion26. Indeed, fishes accompanying octopuses or other predators with similar foraging strategies (for example, moray eels) can increase prey capture success as they gain access to prey that is being flushed out by the nuclear predator19,21,27. Concurrently, changes in octopus predation success are unclear, with suggestions that the octopus might disregard24, or is being exploited by, fish28. Thus, in these systems, one would expect despotic leadership regarding movement, with fish exclusively following the octopus21,24,28. However, recent qualitative observations of octopuses following fish22,27 suggest the existence of more complex group organizations, in which movement leadership can dynamically change among different individuals. Nonetheless, in the absence of quantitative evidence, the organizational properties and functional nature (that is, exploitative/competitive or collaborative) of the octopus–fish system have remained speculative.Fig. 1: Multispecific hunting assemblages and overview of the core methodology.
a, Multispecific hunting groups can be composed of several species, such as the day octopus O. cyanea, long-barbel goatfish P. macronemus, yellow- and blue-phase goldsaddle goatfish P. cyclostomus, lyretail grouper V. louti and blacktip grouper E. marginatus. Short names are found below common names in the figure and are used hereafter (Supplementary Table 1). b, To reconstruct the hunting scenes in 3D, animals were tracked manually in each of the camera videos. We used a stereocamera rig (top) from which habitat features were identified (middle) and camera positions derived (in red) using structure from motion, enabling the calculation of relative 3D track positions (bottom). Colours show individuals present from different species, with large dots representing manual annotations and small dots showing smoothed interpolated tracks. c, Finally, we extracted pulls and anchors from our data using sets of minimum–maximum–minimum dyadic distances (t1, t2, t3), also registering at t3 if the initiation was successful, that is, recruited the follower (resulting in a pull, and the outcomes ‘pulling’ and ‘follower’) or unsuccessful, that is, the initiator moved back towards the partner it failed to engage in moving (resulting in an ‘anchor’, and the outcomes ‘anchored’ and ‘anchoring’). Note that the verbal conjugation highlights the individual that has influence on the movement of the other.
Here we investigate the functional dynamics emerging within multispecies hunting groups composed of one octopus and individuals of several fish species. Using three-dimensional (3D) field-based tracking of individuals participating in octopus–fish hunting groups, we quantify social influence hierarchies as well as composition-driven emergent behaviours and group properties. Using two full-frame wide-lens cameras on an aluminium structure, we obtained 3D reconstructions of environmental features and camera positions using structure from motion, and calculated the 3D trajectories of the individuals comprising the hunting groups (Fig. 1b)29. After a combined total of ~120 h of diving, we successfully filmed and tracked 13 group hunting scenes composed of Octopus cyanea and multiple fish partners, divided into 107 subgroup blocks of 100s (see Methods, ref. 30 and Supplementary Video 2 for an example).
[…]
Supplementary videos 1: Example of a multispecific group hunting and typical movements, featuring all species categories analysed in this study except yellow goatfish.2: Scene reconstruction example of the collective movement of multispecies groups.3: Examples of fish displacing other fish species.4: Examples of octopuses punching fish, thus displacing them.5: Example of a previous fish attack of a structure that triggers a reaction from the octopus and consequent web-over over a food-baited structure.6: Typical movement dynamics and web-over temporal characteristics when octopuses are hunting alone.7: Typical movement dynamics and web-over temporal characteristics when octopuses are hunting in blue goatfish groups.Sampaio, E., Sridhar, V.H., Francisco, F.A. et al. Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups. Nat Ecol Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02525-2
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
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