A multilevel statistical toolkit to study animal social networks: Animal Network Toolkit (ANT) R package

Sosa, Sebastiàn; Puga-Gonzalez, Ivan; Hu, He; Zhang, Peng; Xie, Xiaohua; Sueur, Cédric

doi:10.1101/347005

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…We conducted node label randomisations when investigating node‐level metrics. We used the ‘perm.net.nl’ function in the ANTs package (Sebastian et al., 2018). We used shade use as node labels and directly randomised the shade use values to generate 1000 shuffled data sets for the midday period of each day.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Heat stress conditions affect the social network structure of free‐ranging sheep

Borthwick,

Quiring,

Griffith

et al. 2024

Ecology and Evolution

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Extreme weather conditions, like heatwave events, are becoming more frequent with climate change. Animals often modify their behaviour to cope with environmental changes and extremes. During heat stress conditions, individuals change their spatial behaviour and increase the use of shaded areas to assist with thermoregulation. Here, we suggest that for social species, these behavioural changes and ambient conditions have the potential to influence an individual's position in its social network, and the social network structure as a whole. We investigated whether heat stress conditions (quantified through the temperature humidity index) and the resulting use of shaded areas, influence the social network structure and an individual's connectivity in it. We studied this in free‐ranging sheep in the arid zone of Australia, GPS‐tracking all 48 individuals in a flock. When heat stress conditions worsened, individuals spent more time in the shade and the network was more connected (higher density) and less structured (lower modularity). Furthermore, we then identified the behavioural change that drove the altered network structure and showed that an individual's shade use behaviour affected its social connectivity. Interestingly, individuals with intermediate shade use were most strongly connected (degree, strength, betweenness), indicating their importance for the connectivity of the social network during heat stress conditions. Heat stress conditions, which are predicted to increase in severity and frequency due to climate change, influence resource use within the ecological environment. Importantly, our study shows that these heat stress conditions also affect the animal's social environment through the changed social network structure. Ultimately, this could have further flow on effects for social foraging and individual health since social structure drives information and disease transmission.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We conducted node label randomisations when investigating node-level metrics. We used the 'perm.net.nl' function in the ANTs package (Sebastian et al, 2018).…”

Section: Permutation-based Hypothesis Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heat stress conditions affect the social network structure of free‐ranging sheep

Borthwick,

Quiring,

Griffith

et al. 2024

Ecology and Evolution

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We conducted node label randomisations when investigating node-level metrics. We used the 'perm.net.nl' function in the ANTs package (Sebastian et al 2018). We used shade use as node labels and directly randomised the shade use values to generate 1000 shuffled data sets for the midday period of each day.…”

Section: Permutation Based Hypothesis Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heat stress conditions affect the social network structure of free-ranging sheep

Borthwick

Quiring

Griffith

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Extreme weather conditions, like heatwave events, are becoming more frequent with climate change. Animals often modify their behaviour to cope with environmental changes and extremes. If the environmental conditions influence the trade-off between an individual's social propensity and optimal thermoregulation through shade use for instance, then divergent social decisions may be made. Hence, such behavioural changes have the potential to influence an individual's position in its social network, and the social network structure as a whole. We investigated whether heat stress conditions (quantified through the Temperature Humidity Index) and the resulting use of shaded areas, influences the social network structure and an individual's position in it. We studied this in free-ranging sheep in the arid zone of Australia, GPS-tracking all 48 individuals in a flock. When heat stress conditions worsened, individuals spent more time in the shade and the network was more connected (higher density) and less modular. Furthermore, an individual's social connectivity scaled with its shade use behaviour. Interestingly, individuals with intermediate shade use were most strongly connected (degree, strength, betweeness), indicating their importance for the connectivity of the social network during heat stress conditions. Our study shows that heat stress conditions, which are predicted to increase in severity and frequency due to climate change, influence the resource use within the ecological environment. This has flow on effects for the animal's social environment through the changed social network structure.

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“…We first carried out data-stream permutations using the R package ' ANTs' 60 . In total, 10,000 random networks were created.…”

Section: Social Network Analysis Based On Permutationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aerial drone observations identified a multilevel society in feral horses

Maeda

Ochi

Ringhofer

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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The study of non-human multilevel societies can give us insights into how group-level relationships function and are maintained in a social system, but their mechanisms are still poorly understood. The aim of this study was to apply spatial association data obtained from drones to verify the presence of a multilevel structure in a feral horse society. We took aerial photos of individuals that appeared in pre-fixed areas and collected positional data. The threshold distance of the association was defined based on the distribution pattern of the inter-individual distance. The association rates of individuals showed bimodality, suggesting the presence of small social organizations or “units”. Inter-unit distances were significantly smaller than those in randomly replaced data, which showed that units associate to form a higher-level social organization or “herd”. Moreover, this herd had a structure where large mixed-sex units were more likely to occupy the center than small mixed-sex units and all-male-units, which were instead on the periphery. These three pieces of evidence regarding the existence of units, unit association, and stable positioning among units strongly indicated a multilevel structure in horse society. The present study contributes to understanding the functions and mechanisms of multilevel societies through comparisons with other social indices and models as well as cross-species comparisons in future studies.

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A multilevel statistical toolkit to study animal social networks: Animal Network Toolkit (ANT) R package

Cited by 6 publications

References 31 publications

Heat stress conditions affect the social network structure of free‐ranging sheep

Heat stress conditions affect the social network structure of free‐ranging sheep

Heat stress conditions affect the social network structure of free-ranging sheep

Aerial drone observations identified a multilevel society in feral horses

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