Benj Pettit

I'm a D.Phil. student in the Animal Behaviour Research Group at Oxford University, supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Research

I am interested in collective animal behaviour. In particular, I want to know how individuals balance social cohesion and personal information, and what emergent effects these strategies have on information pooling within the group. My project combines experimental work on homing pigeons with mathematical modelling to find out how the flock resolves informational conflicts and makes a group decision about where to fly. I am also investigating whether information about familar routes can be socially transmitted. For more on this research topic, see our collective behaviour page.

Background

I completed my bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge in 2008. In my final year, I specialised in zoology and undertook a research project on collective behaviour of cockroaches, based at the Zoological Society of London and supervised by Seirian Sumner and Andy King.

Publications

Pettit, B., A. Flack, R. Freeman, T. Guilford, and D. Biro. "Not just passengers: pigeons, Columba livia, can learn homing routes while flying with a more experienced conspecific." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 280, no. 1750 (2013): 1471-2954.

Contact Details

Benjamin Pettit
Department of Zoology (E23)
South Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3PS

email: benjamin.pettit[at]zoo.ox.ac.uk