Vocal consensus building for collective departures in wild western gorillas

The ability to coordinate actions is of vital importance for group-living animals, particularly in relation to travel. Groups can only remain cohesive if members possess a cooperative mechanism to overcome differences in individual priorities and social power when coordinating departures. To better understand how hominids achieve spatio-temporally coordinated group movements, we investigated vocally-initiated group departures in three habituated groups of western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) in the Central African Republic. The large sexual dimorphism of gorillas has led to the untested assumption that the silverback males are the sole decision-makers in gorilla groups although there are also observations that suggest otherwise. To address this, we analysed the direction and timing of group departures and found that high-ranking individuals (silverbacks and high-ranking females) were more successful in indicating the direction of future travel than others, but that the timing of departure..., Data have been collected on three groups of western gorillas in the Central African Republic during a 12 month field study. , , # Vocal consensus building in wild western gorillas dataset

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ttdz08m5t](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ttdz08m5t)

The data were collected on three gorilla groups (N=14 adult individuals) during a 1-year field study in Central African Republic.

The goal of this study was to investigate decision-making and leadership in western gorillas. We focussed on group departures after resting.

To this study belong the following data and codes:

### Figure 1

data: data_figure1_GLMM1.csv #contains all-occurrence data with for each subject present at the resting site whether they initiated or not

code: Figure1_GLMM1.R

columns explanations:

* group = study group
* subject = code for individual
* subject_date = subject linked with the date (dd.mm.yyyy)
* nr.id.present = number of individuals (>2y) present at resting site
* id.was.sb = whether subject was a silverback
* norm.elo = normalized elo score of subject
* id.was.focal = whether subject was focal subject d...