‘Information ecology’ theory suggests that observing the behaviour of others provides potent social information about resources and threats. Animals integrate this with information from other cues to adjust their expectations about the world and act accordingly.
Social interactions may therefore be crucial for learning and allow populations to respond more rapidly to ecological changes than otherwise expected. Population structure and access to information could also modify how selection pressures are exerted on other species.
If we can understand how social information influences individual’s responses to resources and threats, we should then be able to apply this information to improve our estimates of species’ distributions and help resolve species’ conservation problems.