Factors influencing group foraging in Order Carnivora: A comparative analysis

Foraging is an essential activity that animals engage in to meet their energetic requirements required for survival. As such, foraging strategies and behaviour are likely to be subject to selection and adaptive evolution across species. Group foraging is one such strategy and represents a cooperative behaviour that is an important component of foraging efficiency and optimal foraging in many species. Mammals of the Order Carnivora have captured both the public imagination and the attention of scientists due to their spectacular range of behaviours, including foraging strategies. Given the diversity of strategies in the order, carnivorans provide an ideal group for studying the drivers of group foraging in order to understand the conditions under which group foraging has evolved and may be maintained. In this thesis, I aimed to determine the factors that influence group foraging in this order. Using phylogenetic logistic regressions I examined the relationship between ecological and life history predictors, and group foraging in 244 carnivoran mammal species. I also aimed to determine if group foraging is clustered in certain clades within the order using a measure of phylogenetic signal. I found that group foraging was more likely to have evolved in species that had lower diet diversity, ate food items much larger them themselves, lived in social groups and did not forage at night. Foraging strategy across carnivorans is phylogenetically conserved, with a high degree of phylogenetic signal, and tends to be predominantly restricted to certain families (particularly Canidae and Herpestidae). Mapping group foraging and sociality onto phylogeny suggested that group living evolved first in carnivorans, followed by group foraging. These findings establish the prevalence of group foraging and the pattern of its evolution and presents hypotheses with respect to the factors influencing group foraging that can be tested in singlespecies systems.