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.
1: Overview of animal vigilance
2: Function of vigilance
3: Effects of ecological factors on vigilance
4: Vigilance and group size: Theory
5: Vigilance and group size: Empirical findings
6: Synchronization and coordination of vigilance
7: Vigilance when predation risk is relaxed
8: Vigilance in mixed-species groups
9: Development, causation and evolution of vigilance
10: Conclusions and future developments
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 Montréal, Québec, Canada.