scholarly journals Changes in social cohesion in a long-lived species under a perturbation regime

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Genovart ◽  
O. Gimenez ◽  
A. Bertolero ◽  
R. Choquet ◽  
D. Oro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Population Dynamics ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
World Population ◽  
List Type ◽  
Social Species ◽  
The Social ◽  
Capture Recapture ◽  
A Site

AbstractUnderstanding the behaviour of a population under perturbations is crucial and can help to mitigate the effects of global change. Sociality can influence the dynamics of behavioural processes and plays an important role on populations’ resilience. However little is known about the effects of perturbations on the social cohesion of group-living animals.To explore the strength of social cohesion and its dynamics under perturbations, we studied an ecological system involving a colonial, long-lived species living in a site experiencing a shift to a perturbed regime. This regime, caused by the invasion of predators, led this colony to hold from 70% to only 3% of the total world population in only one decade. Because birds breed aggregated in discrete and annually changing patches within large colonies, we could disentangle whether annual aggregation was random or resulted from social bonding among individuals. Our goals were 1) to uncover if there was any long-term social bonding between individuals and 2) to examine whether the perturbation regime affected social cohesion.We explored social cohesion by means of contingency tables and, within the Social Network Analysis framework, by modeling interdependencies among observations using additive and multiplicative effects (AME) and accounted for missing data. We analysed 25 years of monitoring with an individual capture-recapture database of more than 3,500 individuals.We showed that social bonding occurs over years in this species. We additionally show that social bonding strongly decreased after the perturbation regime. We propose that sociality and individual behavioural heterogeneity have been playing a major role driving dispersal and thus population dynamics over the study period.Perturbations may lead not only to changes in individuals’ behaviours and fitness but also to a change in populations’ social cohesion. The demographic consequences of the breaking down of social bonds are still not well understood, but they can be critical for population dynamics of social species. Further studies considering individual heterogeneity, sociality and different types of perturbations should be carried out to improve our understanding on the resilience of social species.

scholarly journals Decrease in social cohesion in a colonial seabird under a perturbation regime

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Genovart ◽  
O. Gimenez ◽  
A. Bertolero ◽  
R. Choquet ◽  
D. Oro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Analysis Framework ◽  
Social Species ◽  
The Social ◽  
Colonial Seabird ◽  
Social Associations ◽  
A Site

Abstract Social interactions, through influence on behavioural processes, can play an important role in populations’ resilience (i.e. ability to cope with perturbations). However little is known about the effects of perturbations on the strength of social cohesion in wild populations. Long-term associations between individuals may reflect the existence of social cohesion for seizing the evolutionary advantages of social living. We explore the existence of social cohesion and its dynamics under perturbations by analysing long-term social associations, in a colonial seabird, the Audouin’s gull Larus audouinii, living in a site experiencing a shift to a perturbed regime. Our goals were namely (1) to uncover the occurrence of long-term social ties (i.e. associations) between individuals and (2) to examine whether the perturbation regime affected this form of social cohesion. We analysed a dataset of more than 3500 individuals from 25 years of monitoring by means of contingency tables and within the Social Network Analysis framework. We showed that associations between individuals are not only due to philopatry or random gregariousness but that there are social ties between individuals over the years. Furthermore, social cohesion decreased under the perturbation regime. We sustain that perturbations may lead not only to changes in individuals’ behaviour and fitness but also to a change in populations’ social cohesion. The consequences of decreasing social cohesion are still not well understood, but they can be critical for the population dynamics of social species.

Conclusions and Prospects

2020 ◽  
pp. 128-132
Author(s):  
Daniel Oro
Keyword(s):  
Population Dynamics ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Tipping Point ◽  
Social Species ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Animals ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Solitary Species

Throughout the book, I have been searching for empirical examples and theories dealing with how perturbations trigger behavioural feedback responses in social animals, how these responses affect the decision to disperse between patches, and the consequences of dispersal for complex, nonlinear population dynamics. What seems quite clear is that social feedbacks—and especially runaway dispersal by copying—do play an important role in those responses, compared to solitary species. Although philopatry to the patch has many benefits, perturbations may decrease the suitability of this patch. When a patch is perturbed, do social species show different responses than solitary species? Since evolution has selected for maximizing fitness prospects, individuals living either in groups or in solitary will try to avoid the detrimental effects of the perturbation, for instance by leaving the patch. The behavioural mechanisms triggered by perturbations are similar for both social and solitary species: increase of information gathering to reduce uncertainty and the use of this updated information to make optimal decisions about either staying or leaving. Thus, the answer is that solitary and social species show similar responses to perturbations. Nevertheless, the way those behavioural mechanisms operate is rather different between social and solitary species: in the former, information is shared among individuals, and decisions about when to leave the patch and where to go are made not only using private or personal information, but mostly using social information. Last but not least, there is social copying, a trend to copy in a nonrational way what others have decided before. This social copying, also called conformity, may trigger what I termed runaway dispersal: perturbations may accumulate over time, decreasing resilience of the social group until attaining a tipping point. Once this threshold is surpassed, the decision to disperse is led by a few individuals, and this decision is copied by the rest of the group in an autocatalytic way....

Strategic and tactical fighting decisions in cichlid fishes with divergent social systems

Behaviour ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 151 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Hick ◽  
Adam R. Reddon ◽  
Constance M. O’Connor ◽  
Sigal Balshine
Keyword(s):  
Social Systems ◽  
Cichlid Fish ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Closely Related Species ◽  
Social Species ◽  
Hierarchy Formation ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contest Behaviour

The costs and benefits of engaging in a contest will differ depending on the social situation of the individuals involved. Therefore, understanding contest behaviour can help to elucidate the trade-offs of living in differing social systems and shed light on the evolution of social behaviour. In the current study, we compared contest behaviour in two closely related species of Lamprologine cichlid fish. Neolamprologus pulcher and Telmatochromis temporalis are both pair-breeding cichlids, but N. pulcher are highly social, group-living fish, while T. temporalis display no grouping behaviour. To examine how competition varies by species, sex and familiarity, we staged same-sex conspecific contests over a shelter, a resource that is highly valued by both species, where contestants were either familiar or unfamiliar to one another. When we examined tactical and strategic components of these contests, we found that the highly social species had shorter contests and engaged in fewer costly aggressive acts than did the non-social species. Individuals of the highly social species were also more likely to resolve conflicts through the use of submissive displays, while individuals of the non-social species were more likely to flee from conflict. Familiarity increased the use of submissive displays in the highly social species but not in the less social species. Our findings suggest that conflict resolution behaviour and dominance hierarchy formation are fundamentally linked to the evolution of complex social systems.

scholarly journals Disease implications of animal social network structure: a synthesis across social systems

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pratha Sah ◽  
Janet Mann ◽  
Shweta Bansal
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Disease Spread ◽  
List Type ◽  
Network Organization ◽  
Social Network Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Disease Costs ◽  
New Perspective

SummaryThe disease costs of sociality have largely been understood through the link between group size and transmission. However, infectious disease spread is driven primarily by the social organization of interactions in a group and not its size.We used statistical models to review the social network organization of 47 species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and insects by categorizing each species into one of three social systems,relatively solitary,gregariousandsocially hierarchical. Additionally, using computational experiments of infection spread, we determined the disease costs of each social system.We find that relatively solitary species have large variation in number of social partners, that socially hierarchical species are the least clustered in their interactions, and that social networks of gregarious species tend to be the most fragmented. However, these structural differences are primarily driven by weak connections, which suggests that different social systems have evolved unique strategies to organize weak ties.Our synthetic disease experiments reveal that social network organization can mitigate the disease costs of group living for socially hierarchical species when the pathogen is highly transmissible. In contrast, highly transmissible pathogens cause frequent and prolonged epidemic outbreaks in gregarious species.We evaluate the implications of network organization across social systems despite methodological challenges, and our findings offer new perspective on the debate about the disease costs of group living. Additionally, our study demonstrates the potential of meta-analytic methods in social network analysis to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses on cooperation, group living, communication, and resilience to extrinsic pressures.

scholarly journals Social convergence of gut microbiomes in vampire bats

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karthik Yarlagadda ◽  
Imran Razik ◽  
Ripan S. Malhi ◽  
Gerald G. Carter
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social History ◽  
Gut Microbiome ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Free Living ◽  
Social Species ◽  
The Social ◽  
Vampire Bats ◽  
The Usa

The ‘social microbiome’ can fundamentally shape the costs and benefits of group-living, but understanding social transmission of microbes in free-living animals is challenging due to confounding effects of kinship and shared environments (e.g. highly associated individuals often share the same spaces, food and water). Here, we report evidence for convergence towards a social microbiome among introduced common vampire bats, Desmodus rotundus , a highly social species in which adults feed only on blood, and engage in both mouth-to-body allogrooming and mouth-to-mouth regurgitated food sharing. Shotgun sequencing of samples from six zoos in the USA, 15 wild-caught bats from a colony in Belize and 31 bats from three colonies in Panama showed that faecal microbiomes were more similar within colonies than between colonies. To assess microbial transmission, we created an experimentally merged group of the Panama bats from the three distant sites by housing these bats together for four months. In this merged colony, we found evidence that dyadic gut microbiome similarity increased with both clustering and oral contact, leading to microbiome convergence among introduced bats. Our findings demonstrate that social interactions shape microbiome similarity even when controlling for past social history, kinship, environment and diet.

A new member or an intruder: how do Sinai spiny mouse (Acomys dimidiatus) families respond to a male newcomer?

Behaviour ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 148 (8) ◽  
pp. 889-908 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Frynta ◽  
Barbora Cížková ◽  
Radim Šumbera
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Spiny Mouse ◽  
Male Resident ◽  
Resident Male ◽  
Social Species ◽  
The Social ◽  
Focal Male ◽  
Lactating Females ◽  
Acomys Dimidiatus

AbstractRecruitment of unrelated individuals into a group plays an important role in the social life of the group living animals. The main goal of our study was to analyze the reactions of established, breeding families of the Sinai spiny mouse, Acomys dimidiatus (Muridae, Rodentia), a social species with precocial pups, to male newcomers in the presence and the absence of a breeding resident male. We compared the behaviour of family members of different sex or age to the presence of a new male. The number of non-aggressive and aggressive interactions with the focal male (resident/newcomer male) was recorded during three periods: before, during and one month after the addition of the newcomer. Only a few aggressive and/or non-aggressive types of contacts occurred before and one month after the addition of the new male. During the experiment, both types of contacts arose, but the results were highly variable. Increased aggressive behaviour of the family toward the intruder was explained mainly by the presence of pregnant or lactating females, which suggests that aggression towards a male newcomer is associated with the reproductive status of females. This phenomenon is most likely connected with the counter-infanticide strategy.

The social wasp Vespula germanica (Fabricius) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) population dynamics in England over 39 years.

2018 ◽  
Vol 154 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-155
Author(s):  
Michael Archer
Keyword(s):  
Population Dynamics ◽  
Population Dynamic ◽  
Ecological Factors ◽  
Social Wasp ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Vespula Germanica ◽  
The Social ◽  
Minimum Number ◽  
Suction Traps

1. Yearly records of worker Vespula germanica (Fabricius) taken in suction traps at Silwood Park (28 years) and at Rothamsted Research (39 years) are examined. 2. Using the autocorrelation function (ACF), a significant negative 1-year lag followed by a lesser non-significant positive 2-year lag was found in all, or parts of, each data set, indicating an underlying population dynamic of a 2-year cycle with a damped waveform. 3. The minimum number of years before the 2-year cycle with damped waveform was shown varied between 17 and 26, or was not found in some data sets. 4. Ecological factors delaying or preventing the occurrence of the 2-year cycle are considered.

Reflections on Lawrence Freedman’s ‘Deterrence’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
International Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Social Strategy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter focuses on the social aspects of strategy, arguing for the importance of relationships in strategy and, in particular, in understanding of deterrence. Deterrence, in its essence, is predicated upon a social relationship – the one deterring and the one to be deterred. Alliance and cooperation are important in generating the means for actively managing international security. Following Freedman’s work on deterrence in the post-Cold War context, ever greater interaction and interdependence might instill a stronger sense of international community, in which more traditional and ‘relatively primitive’ notions of deterrence can be developed. However, this strategic aspiration relies on international, especially transatlantic, social cohesion, a property that weakened in the twenty-first century, triggering new threats from new kinds of opponent. The need for a sophisticated and social strategy for managing international security is made all the more necessary.

Sentencing Policy as a Force for Social Cohesion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Henham
Keyword(s):  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Normative Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sentencing Policy

This chapter sets out the case for adopting a normative approach to conceptualizing the social reality of sentencing. It argues that policy-makers need to comprehend how sentencing is implicated in realizing state values and take greater account of the social forces that diminish the moral credibility of state sponsored punishment. The chapter reflects on the problems of relating social values to legal processes such as sentencing and argues that crude notions of ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’ approaches to policy-making should be replaced by a process of contextualized policy-making. Finally, the chapter stresses the need for sentencing policy to reflect those moral attachments that bind citizens together in a relational or communitarian sense. It concludes by exploring these assertions in the light of the sentencing approach taken by the courts following the English riots of 2011.

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