Sociality and its Relevance in Group Hunting Mammalian Predators

Abstract

What sets apart social predators from other predators is their ability to hunt together and successfully attack prey larger than themselves, defend territories and offspring, and transmit information to successive generations. Group hunting may not be the norm and ecological pressures as well as the need to survive and reproduce require them to be nimble and switch to solitary hunts while maintaining diverse social groupings. Participation and allegiance to specific social groups may provide these social predators to evolve specialized group hunting techniques, protect young, and satisfy foraging and reproductive demands. Additionally, social membership may bestow group members with the capacity to adapt and be resilient to environmental disturbance through social learning. In this chapter, we summarize key findings and present commonalities and differences in the social dynamics and hunting strategies of spotted hyena, African & Asiatic lions, gray wolves, killer whales, and African wild dogs. For most terrestrial species, group hunting may at least in part be an artifact of gregariousness due to reproductive strategies—which are probably best established for African lions among our focal species, whereas for mammal-hunting killer whales, we speculate the opposite, wherein sociality is a by-product of a cooperative hunting lifestyle. Above all as scientists in the field, we must be persistent in conducting or contributing data toward comparative studies of social predators across marine and terrestrial environments.