A key goal of conservation is to protect biodiversity by supporting the long-term persistence
of viable, natural populations of wild species. Conservation practice has long been guided …

When individual animals make decisions, they routinely use information produced
intentionally or unintentionally by other individuals. Despite its prevalence and established …

Metaheuristics play a crucial role in solving optimization problems. The majority of such
algorithms are inspired by collective intelligence and foraging of creatures in nature. In this …

Social organisation in animals takes many forms. It includes assemblages of territorial
animals, dominance hierarchies and social groups, among other things. The basic tenet that …

Observations of animals feeding in aggregations are often interpreted as events of social
foraging, but it can be difficult to determine whether the animals arrived at the foraging sites …

Predation and scavenging have been classically understood as independent processes,
with predator–prey interactions and scavenger–carrion relationships occurring separately …

Vulture population declines have been noted in West and Southern Africa, but have not
been assessed in East Africa. Roadside transects conducted in 1976 and 1988 were …

Due to the potentially detrimental consequences of low performance in basic functional
tasks, individuals are expected to improve performance with age and show the most marked …

Although there is a diversity of concerns about recent persistent declines in the abundances
of many species, the implications for the associated delivery of ecosystem services to people …

Abstract The African Vultures Optimization Algorithm (AVOA) is a recently developed meta-
heuristic algorithm inspired by the foraging behavior of African vultures in nature. This …