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Abstract The idea that organisms benefit by acquiring information through social connections is a cornerstone of our understanding of social evolution and collective behaviour. Yet, while learning about the world through social ties can confer many benefits, these connections can also serve as conduits for misinformation. Studies of misinformation in human social systems are rapidly proliferating, yet our understanding of the biological origins of misinformation remains surprisingly limited. In this review, we survey examples of socially transmitted misinformation across biological systems. Our central findings are (i) that the transmission and use of misinformation is widespread in biological systems spanning levels of organization, and (ii) that the production and transmission of misinformation is probably an inevitable property that inherits from fundamental constraints on biological communication systems, rather than a pathology that lies apart from the normal functioning of such systems. In this light, we argue that there is a need for a more integrated theoretical and empirical science of misinformation in biology. We end by highlighting four emerging questions about misinformation and its role in driving ecological and evolutionary dynamics that this new field of inquiry should address. 

Abstract Behavioral plasticity in animals influences direct species interactions, but its effects can also spread unpredictably through ecological networks, creating indirect interactions that are difficult to anticipate. We use coarse‐grained models to investigate how changes in species behavior shape indirect interactions and influence ecological network dynamics. As an illustrative example, we examine predators that feed on two types of prey, each of which temporarily reduces activity after evading an attack, thereby lowering vulnerability at the expense of growth. We demonstrate that this routine behavior shifts the indirect interaction between prey species from apparent competition to mutualism or parasitism. These shifts occur when predator capture efficiency drops below a critical threshold, causing frequent hunting failures. As a result, one prey species indirectly promotes the growth of the other by relaxing its density dependence through a cascade of network effects, paradoxically increasing predator biomass despite decreased hunting success. Empirical capture probabilities often fall within the range where such dynamics are predicted. We characterize such shifts in the qualitative nature of species interactions as changes ininteraction valence, highlighting how routine animal behaviors reshape community structure through cascading changes within ecological networks. 

ABSTRACT Disparate bodies of literature implicate risk avoidance and energy conservation as important drivers of animal movement decisions. Theory posits that these phenomena interact in ecologically consequential ways, but rigorous empirical tests of this hypothesis have been hampered by data limitations. We fuse fluid dynamics, telemetry, and attack data to reconstruct risk and energy landscapes traversed by migrating juvenile salmon and their predators. We find that migrants primarily use midriver microhabitats that facilitate migration at night. During daylight, predators become more aggressive in the midriver, and prey reduce midriver use in favour of nearshore microhabitats, resulting in increased energy expenditure and decreased migration efficiency. Predators attack most when migrants are not prioritising threat avoidance and during ephemeral periods of low lighting. Our findings suggest that predator–prey interactions result from an interplay between landscapes of fear and energy, which can determine the degree to which predators affect prey through mortality or fear. 

Predator–prey interactions are fundamental to ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Yet, predicting the outcome of such interactions—whether predators intercept prey or fail to do so—remains a challenge. An emerging hypothesis holds that interception trajectories of diverse predator species can be described by simple feedback control laws that map sensory inputs to motor outputs. This form of feedback control is widely used in engineered systems but suffers from degraded performance in the presence of processing delays such as those found in biological brains. We tested whether delay-uncompensated feedback control could explain predator pursuit manoeuvres using a novel experimental system to present hunting fish with virtual targets that manoeuvred in ways that push the limits of this type of control. We found that predator behaviour cannot be explained by delay-uncompensated feedback control, but is instead consistent with a pursuit algorithm that combines short-term forecasting of self-motion and prey motion with feedback control. This model predicts both predator interception trajectories and whether predators capture or fail to capture prey on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrate how animals can combine short-term forecasting with feedback control to generate robust flexible behaviours in the face of significant processing delays.