How animals transfer power from one leader to another: Brute force, inheritance and consensus
elisfkc2 / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
Bees, chimps, clownfish and hyenas all live in groups with a leader or dominant individual. So do many other animals. How does power shift from one animal to another?
The transfer of power is sometimes not that simple.
As the United States inaugurates a new president on Wednesday, here’s a look at the different ways the animal kingdom handles changes in leadership.
Brute force
For chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, a change in the alpha male can be a fairly brutal affair.
1
2Clinical Trials Unit, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
In 1954, Haldane and Spurway published a paper in which they discussed the information content of the honey bee waggle dance with regard to the ideas of Norbert Wiener, who had recently developed a formal theory of information. We return to this concept by reanalyzing the information content in both vector components (direction, distance) of the waggle dance using recent empirical data from a study that investigated the accuracy of the dance. Our results show that the direction component conveys 2.9 bits and the distance component 4.5 bits of information, which agrees to some extent with Haldane and Spurway s estimates that were based on data gathered by von Frisch. Of course, these are small amounts of information compared to what can be conveyed, given enough time, by human language, or compared to what is routinely transferred via the internet. Nevertheless, small amounts of information can be very valuable if it is