Population Dynamics of Social Species under Perturbations
The detection of abrupt changes in natural populations of social and nonsocial animals as a result of perturbations is challenging. This chapter highlights some empirical examples from the literature and the author’s own studies, and the responses of populations of species with different degree of sociality are compared. To overcome the difficulties of obtaining field population data, theoretical approaches can be very useful for simulating these responses from social feedbacks. These models show the influence of social information and social copying to generate nonlinear population dynamics, such as bifurcations and cascades. The chapter’s final section explores the stability properties of populations subjected to perturbations and the role of social feedbacks for resilience. These properties depend on the time of occupation of the patch, its suitability compared to other patches, and the type of perturbation (e.g. pulsed, in regime, or in combination). This section ends by exploring how social copying influences collective cultural innovations of social populations under perturbations. For instance, the American Pueblo tribe colonized riverine habitats and changed their way of living following the collapse of their original habitat due to droughts and tribal fights.