Synchronous breathing by pilot whales

摘要

When two or more animals behave synchronously, then, unless they are both independently responding to some external stimulus, they are attempting to match to each other’s behavior, or at least one is trying to match the other’s behavior. Synchrony can thus be a particularly clear example of integrative behavior (Whitehead 2008), and so synchronous behavior can be used to indicate af?liative relationships among individuals and thus to build models of social structure. Synchrony has been described in a range of animal groups, including odontocete cetaceans (Norris and Dohl 1980, Heimlich-Boran 1988, Whitehead 1996, Mann and Smuts 1999, Hastie et al. 2003, Connor et al. 2006, Perelberg and Schuster 2008, Sakai et al. 2009).