Personality composition affects group cohesion of homing pigeons in response to novelty and predation threat

Understanding how and why animal groups behave collectively is a central question in behavioural and social sciences. Variation in the phenotypic composition of the individuals within a group can lead to differences in group attributes and performance. However, whether and how individual personalities translate into group performance is not yet fully understood because experiments that test such hypotheses in realistic set-ups are still scarce. We explored how between-group variation in personality composition affected flock cohesion during homing flights of homing pigeons, Columba livia. Based on consistent individual differences, we established flocks of either ‘more reactive’ (MR flocks) or ‘less reactive’ (LR flocks) pigeons naïve to homing. Cohesion of flocks was tested in three distinct challenges: (1) first-ever collective homing experience (novelty); (2) release from a novel site (novel site homing); and (3) hunt by a robotic peregrine falcon (predation threat), with the la..., Personality
Each bird was subjected to three behavioural tasks to define its personality traits: Flight Initiation Distance (FID), Escape Reaction Time (ERT) and Exploration Propensity (EXP). To assess the consistency of individual responses over time, we performed two replicas of each test. The second replica took place 1 week after the completion of the first one. The sequence of tests was randomized for each individual in each replica. The repeatability of the response of the birds to the first and second replicas of each test was assessed using mixed effect models through package rptR 0.9.22 (Stoffel et al., 2017) with 1000 bootstraps. The repeatability was adjusted taking into account the level of experience of tested birds, which could affect the response.
The personality identified for each pigeon was used to assort monotypic flocks constituted of four individuals (only more reactive or less reactive). To assess the bird personality, we firstly ranked individual responses to each..., , # Personality composition affects group cohesion of homing pigeons in response to novelty and predation threat

We have submitted our raw data (**ERT_test_results.csv, FID_test_results.csv and EXP_test_results.csv**) with results of personality tests for the three replicas, the deployment information on monotypic flock releases (**deployments.csv**), the coordinates of release sites and home loft location (**release_loc_2022.csv**), the cleaned tracking data for all homing flights – both from familiar release site (**data_clean_releases_R1.csv**) and not familiar release sites (**data_clean_releases_NoFamiliar.csv**). Empty cells (Nas) in the datasets are due to not available data. We have included R scripts to perform the analyses with: 01.Repetability_Response.R; 02.SplitsEvaluation.R (which requires files: **MonoFlock_complete_data_20231222.rds**and **MonoFlock_complete_data_NF_20240122.rds**); 03.Statistical_Analysis.R (which requires files: **split_flock4.rds; split_flock4_NF.rds**...,