A Network of African Wild Dogs
link: https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/wild-dogs-vote-sneezing
Humans around the world have come up with different ways to make decisions as a group. We can vote by raising our hands, by ballot, electronically, or by shouting “aye.” Similarly, most social animals also have some sort of method to exercise democracy. For example, honeybees vote with headbutts, and herds of red deer decide to move as a group only when at least 60% of the pack stands up.
In a recent study, scientists have discovered that African wild dogs vote by sneezing. They found that a pack of African wild dogs decides whether to move from a resting spot based upon the number of sneezes. A quorum of about ten sneezes is needed for the group to decide to get moving. Interestingly, some dogs’ sneezes matter more than others. When a dominant female or male sneezes, the quorum lowers to just three sneezes.
The sneeze is more of an “audible, rapid forced exhalation through the nose” than an “ah-choo” noise. The sneeze has not been documented before as a method of communication for African wild dogs, but it is not all too strange as other species such as meerkats and mountain gorillas also produce their own unique noises to signal whether they want the group to change activity.
Similar to the 34 person karate club, some nodes of the network are more important than others. The dominant pair have the most say in deciding the collective behavior of the network. However, each individual’s actions (sneezes) do have some effect on the outcome of everyone in the network. It would be interesting to study the behavior of African wild dogs using graph theory. If the graph resembles the graph of the karate club, then the dominant dogs may have more power because they have links to all of the dogs in the network or perhaps the entire network is linked and the two dominant dogs have stronger ties than the other dogs. The graph may be better modeled using directed edges, where there could be two edges between the dominant dog and a normal dog with different values attached to the edges.
African wild dogs are one of the world’s most endangered species, so spread awareness of these sneezing voters.
Pim Stouten/Flickr