2013) have also been found to convey information about the presence of predators in animal collectives. 2020) or changes in posture (Brown et al. 2017), fright responses (Chivers and Ferrari 2014 Cruz et al. This process often takes place through evolved signals such as alarm calls, but social cues including sudden movements (Coleman 2008 Hingee and Magrath 2009 Boujja-Miljour et al. Under predation risk, dynamic information about threats is transmitted from alarmed group members to naïve ones, a phenomenon that is commonly called collective detection (Lima 1990 Pays et al. 2017), and thus ISI use is usually associated with species where social interactions promote information transmission among groupmates (King and Cowlishaw 2007 Duboscq et al. The advantages of living in social groups are thought to include the opportunity to access social information (Krause and Ruxton 2002 Ward and Webster 2016 Goodale et al. Inadvertent social information (ISI) use is known to occur in many ecological contexts, including predator avoidance, foraging and habitat choice (Danchin et al. One type of social information is associated with inadvertently produced social cues that include the presence or the behaviour of others, or the product of their behaviour such as scent marks, excretions or food remnants, all of which may provide relevant information about current environmental conditions. 2005 Bonnie and Earley 2007 Hoppitt and Laland 2013). For that, individuals directly interact with the environment to gain up-to-date information about its state (‘personal information’), but they can also complement that knowledge by utilising social information for optimal decision-making (Galef and Giraldeau 2001 Dall et al. Organisms have to gather information about their surroundings to overcome challenges such as finding resources and avoiding danger (Dall and Johnstone 2002). Our work represents a general modelling approach that could be adapted to specific predator-prey systems and scrutinise how temporary local densities allow dynamic information diffusion about predation threats and facilitate population stability in non-grouping animals. We also showed that temporary detection networks had structural properties that allowed efficient information spread among prey under high predation pressure. We found that social information use contributed to population stability and persistence by reducing predation-related per capita mortality and raising equilibrium population sizes when predator detection ability reached a sufficient level. Using an individual-based model, we investigated how the detection and spread of adaptive antipredator behaviour may cascade to changes in the demographic performance of randomly moving (i.e., non-grouping) prey. The exploitation of inadvertently produced social cues may not only modify individual behaviour but also fundamentally influence population dynamics and species interactions. Our study provides hypothetical mechanisms about how temporary local densities may allow information diffusion about predation threats among conspecifics and facilitate population stability and persistence in non-grouping animals. When prey exploited social cues in the presence of high predation risk, the observed detection networks consisted of a large number of connected components with small sizes and small ego networks this resulted in efficient information spread among connected individuals in the detection networks. Moreover, it could substantially contribute to population survival under high predation pressure, but this effect strongly depended on the level of predator detection ability. We found that ISI use was among the most influential model parameters affecting prey abundance and increased equilibrium population sizes in most examined scenarios. We qualitatively assessed how ISI use may affect prey population size when cue detection was associated with different probabilities and fitness costs, and characterised the structural properties of the emerging detection networks that would provide pathways for information spread in prey. In this study, we built an individual-based model where predator avoidance behaviour could spread among randomly moving prey through the network of nearby observers. However, we know little about how such effects may arise when the prey population lacks social structure beyond the spatiotemporal autocorrelation originating from the random movement of individuals. Inadvertent social information (ISI) use, i.e., the exploitation of social cues including the presence and behaviour of others, has been predicted to mediate population-level processes even in the absence of cohesive grouping.
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