Collective behaviour is common in bacteria, plants and animals, and therefore occurs across ecosystems, from biofilms to cities. With collective behaviour, social interactions among individuals propagate to affect the behaviour of groups, whereas group-level responses in turn affect individual behaviour. These cross-scale feedback loops between individuals, populations and their environments can provide fitness benefits, such as the efficient exploitation of uncertain resources, as well as costs, such as increased resource competition. Although the social mechanics of collective behaviour are increasingly well-studied, its role in ecosystems remains poorly understood. Here we introduce collective movement into a model of consumer–resource dynamics to demonstrate that collective behaviour can attenuate consumer–resource cycles and promote species coexistence. We focus on collective movement as a particularly well-understood example of collective behaviour. Adding collective movement to canonical unstable ecological scenarios causes emergent social–ecological feedback, which mitigates conditions that would otherwise result in extinction. Collective behaviour could play a key part in the maintenance of biodiversity. |
