Red deer Cervus elaphus blink more in larger groups.

ABSTRACT: Most animals need to spend time being vigilant for predators, at the expense of other activities such as foraging. Group-living animals can benefit from the shared vigilance effort of other group members, with individuals reducing personal vigilance effort as group size increases. Behaviors like active scanning or head lifting are usually used to quantify vigilance but may not be accurate measures of this. We suggest that measuring an animal's blinking rate gives a meaningful measure of vigilance: increased blinking implies reduced vigilance, as the animal cannot detect predators when its eyes are closed. We describe an observational study of a captive population of red deer, where we measured the blinking rates of individual deer from groups of differing sizes (where mean group size range

SUBMITTER: Rowe ZW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10015368 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature