Pranav Minasandra, PhD

Behavioural dynamics

All animals behave. By that, I mean that all animals constantly switch between more-or-less distinct behavioural states. Behaviour helps animals tolerate heterogeneity and unpredictability in the environment. Are there common structural patterns that appear in the behavioural sequences of all animals?

Mutual information decays in strikingly similar ways across species.

Different behavioural decisions are made at different time-scales. Going forward, I will also look at what time-scales are relevant to behaviour, and how those time-scales interact. I will also examine what combination of decision-making time-scales is optimal for animals, and how individual decisions combine to generate group behaviours.

Read more:

P Minasandra, EM Grout, K Brock, MC Crofoot, et al. Behavioral sequences across multiple animal species in the wild share common structural features PNAS (2025) DOI:10.1073/pnas.2503962122

Group dynamics

Animals live in a stunning variety of societies, ranging from freely composed herds to rigid social groups, and even solitary species. What principles create this variation in social structures? Are the driving forces of sociality very different across species, or can one model explain this variation?

One model can cause various levels of group cohesion with parameter tuning. One model can cause various levels of group cohesion with parameter tuning.

What factors decide the nature of social interactions within a group? How do individuals interact and influence each other? Can we infer fine-scale group interactions from long-scale patterns?

Read more:

  1. P Minasandra Anticipating others' future behaviours alters collective movement and enhances survival biorxiv 2025–08 (2025) DOI:10.1101/2025.08.14.670290
  2. EM Grout, J Ortega, P Minasandra, MJ Quin, et al. Whole Group Tracking Reveals That Relatedness Drives Consistent Subgrouping Patterns in White-Nosed Coatis Animal Behaviour 175–193 (2024) DOI:10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.08.010

Other curiosities

At a wide variety of time-scales, I ask questions regarding specific behaviours in specific species. These range from 24 h daily activity patterns and their social synchronisation in spotted hyenas to instant-to-instant vigilance decisions in groups of meerkats.

Three vigilant meerkats.

Other questions I'm working on include: how does the ability to reason affect animals' social behaviour? How should cohesion signals be optimised for desired levels of group cohesion? How do cohesion and social differentiation function at different temporal scales?

Read more:

P Minasandra, FH Jensen, AS Gersick, KE Holekamp, et al. Accelerometer-based predictions of behaviour elucidate factors affecting the daily activity patterns of spotted hyenas Royal Society Open Science 11 230750 (2023) DOI:10.1098/rsos.230750