Collective Sensing of Flows

The energy that soaring animals depend on — thermals, updrafts, the structure of moving air — is invisible and constantly shifting. No individual can sense all of it at once, but a group can. We study collective sensing: how individuals read the movements of others to locate energy they could not detect alone, effectively sampling the environment through their neighbours. Soaring birds and competitive paraglider pilots both exploit this, climbing on cues from those who found the lift first, and it raises sharp questions about when to share, when to follow, and when to go it alone.

Projects

Eavesdropping on Social Information in Soaring-Gliding Flight

Our work asks how animals use the movements of others to make better decisions about when and where to move. These decisions can have major energetic consequences, especially in systems where conditions change rapidly and key resources are difficult to detect directly. This is particularly true for soaring birds, which must glide between rising air currents and risk losing valuable altitude with every poor decision. A central question in this research is therefore how do individuals reduce uncertainty when moving through environments where the most important resources, such as uplift, are invisible, dynamic and short-lived.

This line of work began with our study of Gyps vultures flying in shared airspace at Le Rocher des Aigles in France. By tagging multiple birds flying in the same airspace, we tested whether individuals monitor the movements of others to gain information about updraft location and flight conditions. Our findings supported the idea that social information can allow birds to adopt riskier, but potentially more efficient, gliding strategies. This provided one of the first mechanistic demonstrations that animals may eavesdrop on the locomotion of others to improve movement decisions, and suggested a route by which large-scale aerial associations and movement networks can emerge.

Since then, this question has expanded into a broader research programme on sensory collectives: how information is distributed across groups, how it is perceived through the behaviour of others, and how local information use shapes collective structure. In our current condor work, we are extending these ideas into a natural long-term system to test how social information influences cohesion, following behaviour and flight efficiency in one of the world’s most obligate soaring birds. Together, this research aims to understand when social cues reduce uncertainty, how they improve movement outcomes, and how information exchange helps organise collective behaviour in dynamic environments.