How totally different fowl species forage collectively within the Antarctic

It’s a scene match for a nature documentary: In the frigid ocean surrounding Antarctica, the water boils over as seabirds dive from above and marine animals like seals and whales rise from the depths to all feast on krill.

But zoom out and this flurry of exercise is only a tiny speck in a desolate seascape. Scientists have been puzzled by how these varied species are all capable of finding the identical meals supply on the similar time.

“It’s hard to get across just how forbidding this environment is,” mentioned Sönke Johnsen, a professor of biology at Duke University Trinity School of Arts & Sciences. 

In analysis published October 6 within the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Johnsen, Duke postdoctoral scholar Jesse Granger, and University of California, Davis colleague Gabrielle Nevitt tease out how a number of species of Antarctic seabirds forage collectively – with takeaways for conservation and for crowd habits.

Nevitt is a sensory ecologist who has studied how sensory cues set off feeding aggregations within the Southern Ocean, specializing in petrel and albatross (procellariform) species. She describes how, when trying to find meals, a few of these seabirds fly nearer to the water and observe a scented chemical known as dimethyl sulfide (DMS) that’s related to krill. Other seabird species fly larger up and appear to observe the smellers, following their lead.

“Exploiting food is probably very competitive, but finding it is cooperative,” mentioned Nevitt.

Tracking the motion of those totally different fowl species is extremely difficult within the area. At a course in Sweden, Nevitt met Granger, a modeler, who provided to assist and herald her mentor Johnsen, an animal imaginative and prescient specialist. The thought was to make use of laptop modeling to higher perceive how these species work together when they’re foraging.

“You treat each animal sort of like it’s a video game character,” mentioned Granger. “You give it rules about how it should behave and then you get this emergent behavior.”

Granger arrange a number of eventualities of flocks, with totally different ratios of fowl species that use odor and those who use sight to forage. She additionally adjusted how species responded to one another – typically simply following what their neighbors do; different occasions, monitoring birds with complementary senses and following their lead.

Running these totally different eventualities, the staff discovered that certainly the foraging methods the place several types of seabirds picked up cues from one another led to essentially the most profitable charges of discovering meals. Having even just a few scent monitoring birds advantages these searching visually to search out prey, displaying the significance of sustaining balanced populations within the wild to maintain them resilient.

“The whole group does better when it’s a mixture of different species using different strategies to forage,” mentioned Granger. “If you reduce past a certain tipping point in size or in proportion, then the whole group ends up collapsing.”

Beyond informing conservation methods, this sort of analysis may assist us perceive dynamics of complicated methods that characteristic many people – even crowds of people.

“When we go to the state fair, nobody knows where the entrance is,” mentioned Johnsen. Somehow, all of us work collectively to funnel into the doorway. A small share of those who picks up sure cues might have an outsized impression on directing the motion of the gang as a complete.

This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-20-1-0399) and a National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

Citation: “Multispecies sensory networks and social foraging strategies: Implications for population decline in procellariiform seabirds,” Jesse Granger, Gabrielle Nevitt, Sönke Johnsen. 6 October 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2509317122.

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