The 43rd public lecture, titled “Challenges from Kyrgyzstan: Strategies, Achievements, and Prospects for Promoting Exchange with Japan in the Field of Higher Education in Cooperation with Kazakhstan and Mongolia,” was held on Monday, November 14, 2023. Dr. MAEDA Tamao, JSPS Research Fellow PD at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies and a Specially Appointed Researcher at the Wildlife Research Center of Kyoto University, served as the lecturer. 
She says it has been fascinating to observe wild horses and encounter behaviors and expressions that cannot be seen in domesticated horses. In the lecture, she introduced recent findings on wild horses that inhabit the Arga Mountains in Portugal, combining the latest drone technology with knowledge of animal behavior.
Horses are animals that create harems, but the relationship between harems has not yet been fully researched. There are many advantages to using drones in research on the relationship between horse harems, such as being able to observe many horses at once, putting less stress on the animals than direct observation, enabling observation in places where humans cannot access, and being much cheaper than attaching GPS to each horse.
Surveys using drones have revealed that horses form a “multi-layered society” in which groups of groups come together to form larger groups. In the multi-layered society of horses, harems are distinct from each other and their boundaries do not overlap, but different harems sometimes come together to spend time as the same group, for example, by synchronizing their resting times. In addition to humans, multi-level societies can also be seen in mammals such as horses and monkeys, Asian elephants, sperm whales, orcas, and birds such as guinea fowl. Dr. Maeda suggested that multi-level societies evolved as they allowed animals to gain the benefits of both being in a small group and being in a large group.
The lecture offered a rich opportunity to learn about the latest research methods and the society of horses through a wealth of images and videos of horse herds taken from drones and analysis charts.
