Animal Vigilance: Monitoring Predators and Competitors

Animal Vigilance builds on the author’s previous publication with Academic Press (Social Predation: How Group Living Benefits Predators and Prey) by developing several other themes including the development and mechanisms underlying vigilance, as well as developing more fully the evolution and function of vigilance.

Animal vigilance has been at the forefront of research on animal behavior for many years, but no comprehensive review of this topic has existed. Students of animal behavior have focused on many aspects of animal vigilance, from models of its adaptive value to empirical research in the laboratory and in the field. The vast literature on vigilance is widely dispersed with often little contact between models and empirical work and between researchers focusing on different taxa such as birds and mammals. Animal Vigilance fills this gap in the available material.

• Tackles vigilance from all angles, theoretical and empirical, while including the broadest range of species to underscore unifying themes
• Discusses several newer developments in the area, such as vigilance copying and effect of food density
• Highlights recent challenges to assumptions of traditional models of vigilance, such as the assumption that vigilance is independent among group members, which is reviewed during discussion of synchronization and coordination of vigilance in a group
• Written by a top expert in animal vigilance

Guy Beauchamp is a behavioural ecologist specializing on social foraging in birds. He has written over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has been studying sandpipers for the last 10 years. He currently works as a research officer at the Veterinary College of the University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.