We are continually learning more about the animals around us. You’d think for all the time we’ve spent with them we’d know them better by now, but it turns out we still have a lot to learn.

Advances in technology allow us to track them better, especially on an individual level, and our continually evolving sense of animals as holistic creatures allows us to look at them from a different perspective. One of the things we’ve learned about social animals is how they work together cooperatively.

For years, we assumed that birds flying in a migration “V” were being led by the alpha flock member leading them across the sky. What we’ve learned is that the lead bird in a migrating “V” isn’t the biggest, strongest bird flying ahead of the flock. The lead position rotates as all the birds take a turn doing the harder work of flying lead and all the birds take a turn resting.

Another example of unexpected cooperation is in herd animals. It used to be assumed that the lead stag in a herd of animals such as gazelle or elk decided when it was time to move the herd from one activity to another (between grazing, watering hole, sleeping areas, etc.). It turns out he bases his decisions on the desires of the rest of the herd.

When the individuals of the herd are ready to move on, they align their body in the direction of where they want to go. When one-third of the herd is aligned toward the watering hole (or wherever they want to go), the leader walks them all down there. It’s actually a pretty democratic process.

Even wolves behave differently than we thought. Wild wolf packs are actually family units, usually consisting of a pair and their offspring of the past two to three years. The parent pair is of course “alpha,” but the relations between their successive generations of offspring are not as strictly defined as previously thought. Different wolves lead under different circumstances and at different parts of a hunt.

We have learned that the wolf pack isn’t always tightly bound. In areas where small game are the main item on the menu, wolf packs seem to be more loosely affiliated. In areas where wolves hunt large prey and need to work together, the packs tend to be more tightly bound and sometimes include several families.

It’s interesting to see how groups of animals succeed by working together more cooperatively than we thought. I guess it’s like us – we succeed better as a people when we work together cooperatively, rather than scrapping for status in an every-man-for-himself hierarchy.