Baptiste Averly

I am interested in understanding how animals within social groups perceive and interact with one another, exchanging and exploiting information to adjust their behaviour in different ecological contexts. What particularly fascinates me is the question of how local interactions between individuals can scale up to complex and relevant group-level responses that are more than the sum of their parts. After undergraduate studies in France and Canada, for my Master’s thesis I studied the use of social information in multi-species flocks of tits foraging during winter along an altitudinal gradient.

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For my PhD, which I started in September 2018, I am collecting high-resolution spatial and acoustic data on whole groups of meerkats in their natural habitat using custom-made collars, to understand how collective decision-making is achieved during group movement in this social species with complex vocal communication. Of particular interest to me is the way individual variations and social structure can influence how pairs of individuals respond to one another in different contexts of movement, and how this ultimately affects patterns and processes at the group level.