Animal Vigilance: Monitoring Predators and Competitors

Animal Vigilance builds on the author’s previous publication with Academic Press (Social Predation: How Group Living Benefits Predators and Prey) by developing several other themes including the development and mechanisms underlying vigilance, as well as developing more fully the evolution and function of vigilance.

Animal vigilance has been at the forefront of research on animal behavior for many years, but no comprehensive review of this topic has existed. Students of animal behavior have focused on many aspects of animal vigilance, from models of its adaptive value to empirical research in the laboratory and in the field. The vast literature on vigilance is widely dispersed with often little contact between models and empirical work and between researchers focusing on different taxa such as birds and mammals. Animal Vigilance fills this gap in the available material.

Tackles vigilance from all angles, theoretical and empirical, while including the broadest range of species to underscore unifying themesDiscusses several newer developments in the area, such as vigilance copying and effect of food densityHighlights recent challenges to assumptions of traditional models of vigilance, such as the assumption that vigilance is independent among group members, which is reviewed during discussion of synchronization and coordination of vigilance in a groupWritten by a top expert in animal vigilance

1: Overview of animal vigilance 2: Function of vigilance 3: Effects of ecological factors on vigilance 4: Vigilance and group size: Theory 5: Vigilance and group size: Empirical findings 6: Synchronization and coordination of vigilance 7: Vigilance when predation risk is relaxed 8: Vigilance in mixed-species groups 9: Development, causation and evolution of vigilance 10: Conclusions and future developments