Vocal consensus building for collective departures in wild western gorillas

The ability to coordinate actions is of vital importance for group-living animals, particularly in relation to travel. Groups can only remain cohesive if members possess a cooperative mechanism to overcome differences in individual priorities and social power when coordinating departures. To better understand how hominids achieve spatio-temporally coordinated group movements, we investigated vocally initiated group departures in three habituated groups of western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) in the Central African Republic. The large sexual dimorphism of gorillas has led to the untested assumption that the silverback males are the sole decision-makers in gorilla groups, although there are also observations that suggest otherwise. To address this, we analysed the direction and timing of group departures and found that high-ranking individuals (silverbacks and high-ranking females) were more successful in indicating the direction of future travel than others, but that the timing of departure was the apparent result of a cumulative vocal voting process among all adult group members. Our findings illustrate that even in species with a large sexual size dimorphism, travel decisions can be taken collectively via a consensus-building process.