Cascading Network Effects in Bird Populations
This article describes how bird populations use social information cascades to communicate information about food sources. These bird species rely on swarms of ants as their food supply, and different bird species use different strategies to get the best payoff (which is measured in the amount of food they get). There is high competition for the access to the ant swarms, and the timing of the swarms is highly variable. The two main strategies that the birds employ to find the ants are ant-followers (who evaluate many different ant colonies, finding their various habits and schedules), and then there are opportunists (who take advantage of the information exchanged between ant-followers). The opportunists are where the information cascade comes into play.
The opportunist birds effectively eavesdrop on the songs of the ant-followers, and are able to imply the presence of an ant swarm. This information gets subsequently passed down through the ecosystem so the most proactive birds detect the presence of a swarm first, and the more opportunistic birds (who wait for other birds to communicate a signal), learn of the swarm last. Once the information has spread throughout the entire ecosystem, many different species of birds flock to the ant swarm and competition ensues. This is a good example of a cascading network effect, where a trend/information spreads rapidly throughout a network after starting at a central node. It also shows that cascading network effects are not only present in human social networks, but also in nature.
Source:https://sciencetrends.com/using-social-information-cascade-to-spread-information/