Friends or foes? The social behaviours and system of estuarine crocodiles

All animal species are inherently social. Regardless of a species' level of gregariousness, individuals must make social decisions to balance the costs and benefits of sharing their environment with conspecifics. However, our understanding of animal sociality has primarily been built on the study of group-living species. Far less attention has been given to understanding the sociality of non-group living species, which are often assumed to lack the social complexity and competence of group-living species. This is mainly due to the difficulty of observing and examining the social behaviours of non-group living species because of the rarity in which interactions occur and the large and often inaccessible areas these animals inhabit.

In this talk, Cameron will demonstrate how techniques and approaches from spatial ecology and socioecology can be integrated to gain insights into the social behaviours and systems of non-group living species. For this, he will be using the estuarine crocodile Crocodylus porosus as his model species. Throughout the talk, Cameron will demonstrate that rather than being ‘asocial’ and intolerant of conspecifics, estuarine crocodiles instead inhabit a highly dynamic social system, where individuals actively control how they associate with conspecifics depending on their maturity status, movement strategy and time of year.

Cameron Baker completed his Bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Zoology at the University of Queensland in 2016. This was then followed by an Honour’s degree in Ecology in 2017 and a PhD in Behavioural Ecology (2018-2022). His focus during these years was on investigating the interface between the spatial and social behaviours of animals, and how this in turn influences a species' ecology and distribution. Cameron started as a Postdoc at RIEL in 2023, where he will be assessing the ecological impact of the large carnivore (crocodile) recovery in the Northern Territory.

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