A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group‐Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms

Avilés, Leticia; Harwood, Gyan

doi:10.1111/eth.12028

Cited by 44 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Examples of socially hierarchical species include carpenter ants ( Camponotus fellah ), yellow baboons ( Papio cynocephalus ), male elephant seals ( Mirounga angustirostris ) and spotted hyenas ( Crocuta crocuta ). We note that animal social behaviour is being increasingly recognized to span a continuum from solitary to eusocial (Aureli et al., ; Aviles & Harwood, ; Silk, Cheney, & Seyfarth, ), with most species showing some level of fission–fusion dynamics (Silk, Croft, Tregenza, & Bearhop, ). The division of social systems into three discrete, albeit arbitrary, categories allows for simple distinctions in the organization of network structure and disease risks among species that are characterized by different complexity in group living behaviour.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…While this categorization scheme is convenient, it does not capture the continuum of social behaviour. As a step forward, recent studies have proposed quantitative indices of sociality (Aviles & Harwood, ; Silk, Altmann, & Alberts, ). The results of our study support the potential use of network structure as a means of quantifying social complexity across taxonomic boundaries.…”

Section: Challenges and Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disease implications of animal social network structure: A synthesis across social systems

Sah

Mann

Bansal

2018

Journal of Animal Ecology

120

137

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The 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, gregarious and socially 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 suggest 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.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Challenges and Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disease implications of animal social network structure: A synthesis across social systems

Sah

Mann

Bansal

2018

Journal of Animal Ecology

120

137

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…One view argues for cooperation being considered as a continuum (Sherman et al . ; Avilés & Harwood ). Under such a scenario, elevated values of a particular environmental feature might be associated with cooperation and the most cooperative species are expected to occupy ranges with the most extreme environmental values.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Different axes of environmental variation explain the presence vs. extent of cooperative nest founding associations in Polistes paper wasps

et al. 2015

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Ecological constraints on independent breeding are recognized as major drivers of cooperative breeding across diverse lineages. How the prevalence and degree of cooperative breeding relates to ecological variation remains unresolved. Using a large dataset on cooperative nesting in Polistes wasps we demonstrate that different aspects of cooperative breeding are likely to be driven by different aspects of climate. Whether or not a species forms cooperative groups is associated with greater short-term temperature fluctuations. In contrast, the number of cooperative foundresses increases in more benign environments with warmer, wetter conditions. The same dataset reveals that intraspecific responses to climate variation do not mirror genus-wide trends and instead are highly heterogeneous among species. Collectively these data suggest that the ecological drivers that lead to the origin or loss of cooperation are different from those that influence the extent of its expression within populations.

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“…It is clear that categories of sociality are artificial, if useful, delineations imposed on what is actually a continuum of behaviours (Agnarsson, 2006;Rayor & Taylor, 2006;Avilés & Harwood, 2012), and several species share characteristics of different levels of sociality. The crab spiders Diaea inornata and Di.…”

Section: (4) Transitional Speciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Others have focused on 'colonial' spiders, also termed 'communal' (Wilson, 1971) or 'territorial permanent-social' (Avilés, 1997), in which spiders construct webs in tandem, share support threads, but show little direct cooperation (Uetz & Hieber, 1997;Whitehouse & Lubin, 2005;Lubin & Bilde, 2011). Subsocial spiders have been incorporated into reviews of cooperative spider sociality, primarily in evaluating the 'subsocial route' to permanent sociality, in which the gregarious phase of subsocial spiders is extended until the solitary phase is completely eliminated (Avilés, 1997;Whitehouse & Lubin, 2005;, 2011Avilés & Harwood, 2012); however, subsociality and maternal care in spiders has not been reviewed extensively since Krafft & Horel (1980); Buskirk (1981), and D' Andrea (1987). Subsocial spiders have been incorporated into reviews of cooperative spider sociality, primarily in evaluating the 'subsocial route' to permanent sociality, in which the gregarious phase of subsocial spiders is extended until the solitary phase is completely eliminated (Avilés, 1997;Whitehouse & Lubin, 2005;, 2011Avilés & Harwood, 2012); however, subsociality and maternal care in spiders has not been reviewed extensively since Krafft & Horel (1980); Buskirk (1981), and D' Andrea (1987).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maternal care and subsocial behaviour in spiders

Yip

Rayor

2013

Biological Reviews

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While most spiders are solitary and opportunistically cannibalistic, a variety of social organisations has evolved in a minority of spider species. One form of social organisation is subsociality, in which siblings remain together with their parent for some period of time but disperse prior to independent reproduction. We review the literature on subsocial and maternal behaviour in spiders to highlight areas in which subsocial spiders have informed our understanding of social evolution and to identify promising areas of future research. We show that subsocial behaviour has evolved independently at least 18 times in spiders, across a wide phylogenetic distribution. Subsocial behaviour is diverse in terms of the form of care provided by the mother, the duration of care and sibling association, the degree of interaction and cooperation among siblings, and the use of vibratory and chemical communication. Subsocial spiders are useful model organisms to study various topics in ecology, such as kin recognition and the evolution of cheating and its impact on societies. Further, why social behaviour evolved in some lineages and not others is currently a topic of debate in behavioural ecology, and we argue that spiders offer an opportunity to untangle the ecological causes of parental care, which forms the basis of many other animal societies.

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A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group‐Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms

Cited by 44 publications

References 49 publications

Disease implications of animal social network structure: A synthesis across social systems

Disease implications of animal social network structure: A synthesis across social systems

Different axes of environmental variation explain the presence vs. extent of cooperative nest founding associations in Polistes paper wasps

Maternal care and subsocial behaviour in spiders

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