Vulturine guineafowl (Acryllium vulturinum) are the largest species of guineafowl and are highly social, exhibiting distinct decision-making structures. This project seeks to better understand their social structure and decision-making — but how does one answer questions of the collective movement, social dynamics, and fitness consequences of these social decision-making vulturine guineafowl? By incorporating state-of-the-art technology and computational techniques with lifetime monitoring of individuals!
In 2016, the social lives of these brilliantly blue birds became the focus of the Vulturine Guineafowl Project. In the first three years, the project team has trapped and marked a whopping 900 individual birds, and fit solar-powered GPS tags to individuals in every social group in the study area. Combining the detailed information about the home range and movement of each group, together with daily censuses of group membership and affiliative interactions, provides the basis for mechanistic studies that shed light on processes ranging from the energetics of movements to the consequences of harsh droughts, and how these processes are altered by living in differently sized groups.
The team hopes that these unique long-term, large-scale, and high-resolution data will provide the critical pieces for answering key questions about the evolution of animal societies and how species will adapt to novel environmental conditions.
