Data from: The Achilles' heel hypothesis: misinformed keystone individuals impair collective learning and reduce group success

Many animal societies rely on highly influential keystone individuals for proper functioning. When information quality is important for group success, such keystone individuals have the potential to diminish group performance if they possess inaccurate information. Here we test whether information quality (accurate or inaccurate) influences collective outcomes when keystone individuals are the first to acquire it. We trained keystone or generic individuals to attack or avoid novel stimuli and implanted these seed individuals within groups of naïve colony-mates. We subsequently tracked how quickly groups learned about their environment in situations that matched (accurate information) or mismatched (inaccurate information) the training of the seed individual. We found that colonies with just one accurately informed individual were quicker to learn to attack a novel prey stimulus than colonies with no informed individuals. However, this effect was no more pronounced when the informed individual was a keystone individual. In contrast, keystones with inaccurate information had larger effects than generic individuals with identical information: groups containing keystones with inaccurate information took longer to learn to attack/avoid prey/predator stimuli and gained less weight than groups harboring generic individuals with identical information. Our results convey that misinformed keystone individuals can become points of vulnerability for their societies.

诸多动物社群的正常运转高度依赖具备极强影响力的基石个体（keystone individuals）。当信息质量对群体成功至关重要时，这类基石个体若掌握不准确的信息，反而可能削弱群体表现。本研究旨在检验：当基石个体率先获取信息时，信息质量（准确或不准确）是否会影响群体的集体结果。我们首先对基石个体与普通个体进行训练，使其能够攻击或回避新型刺激，随后将这些示范个体（seed individuals）植入由无相关经验的同巢伙伴组成的群体中。后续我们追踪了，在示范个体的训练信息与实际环境匹配（即信息准确）或不匹配（即信息不准确）的情境下，群体对环境的学习速度。研究结果显示，仅拥有1名掌握准确信息个体的社群，其学习攻击新型猎物刺激的速度快于未拥有任何知情个体的社群。然而，当知情个体为基石个体时，这一优势并未表现得更为显著。与之相反，掌握不准确信息的基石个体，其对群体的负面影响大于携带相同错误信息的普通个体：相较于搭载普通错误信息个体的群体，搭载错误信息基石个体的群体，学习攻击/回避猎物/捕食者刺激的速度更慢，且体重增长更少。本研究结果表明，携带错误信息的基石个体可能成为其所属社群的脆弱性来源。