A test of the social cohesion hypothesis: interactive female marmots remain at home

Blumstein, Daniel T.; Wey, Tina W.; Tang, Karisa N.

doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.0703

Cited by 130 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 32 publications

(45 reference statements)

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“….61 h) during times of peak activity (0700-1000 h and 1600-1900 h) from a distance that did not obviously affect the animals' behavior (20-150 m depending on habitat features). Social interactions between identified individuals were recorded using a detailed ethogram (15). Interactions were classified as affiliative (i.e., allogrooming, forage together within 1 m, greet, sit <1 m apart, play, sniff anogenital region) or agonistic (i.e., aggression, displacement) for analyses, with a small number of ambiguous interactions excluded from the dataset.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Out-degree, in-degree, expansiveness, and attractiveness were based on directed networks (i.e., interactions have an initiator and recipient), whereas betweenness and embeddedness were calculated based on symmetrical networks (i.e., interactions are present or absent, with no directionality). Detailed information on these measures and how they are related to more traditional methods of quantifying social behavior (i.e., number and rate of interactions) is available in SI Text and elsewhere [degree and betweenness (9,40,41), expansiveness and attractiveness (42,43), and embeddedness (15,19)]. …”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, we wished to identify patterns among similar traits in an attempt to discover which interaction types are important in animal social networks. Previous studies of yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventris) social networks have addressed the robustness of network estimates (7), the correlations between network position and dispersal (15), and the roles of age and kinship in structuring networks (10); however, the genetic basis and fitness consequences of network traits are unknown.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Heritable victimization and the benefits of agonistic relationships

Lea

Blumstein²,

Wey³

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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103

100

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Here, we present estimates of heritability and selection on network traits in a single population, allowing us to address the evolutionary potential of social behavior and the poorly understood link between sociality and fitness. To evolve, sociality must have some heritable basis, yet the heritability of social relationships is largely unknown. Recent advances in both social network analyses and quantitative genetics allow us to quantify attributes of social relationships and estimate their heritability in free-living populations. Our analyses addressed a variety of measures (in-degree, out-degree, attractiveness, expansiveness, embeddedness, and betweenness), and we hypothesized that traits reflecting relationships controlled by an individual (i.e., those that the individual initiated or were directly involved in) would be more heritable than those based largely on the behavior of conspecifics. Identifying patterns of heritability and selection among related traits may provide insight into which types of relationships are important in animal societies. As expected, we found that variation in indirect measures was largely explained by nongenetic variation. Yet, surprisingly, traits capturing initiated interactions do not possess significant additive genetic variation, whereas measures of received interactions are heritable. Measures describing initiated aggression and position in an agonistic network are under selection (0.3 < |S| < 0.4), although advantageous trait values are not inherited by offspring. It appears that agonistic relationships positively influence fitness and seemingly costly or harmful ties may, in fact, be beneficial. Our study highlights the importance of studying agonistic as well as affiliative relationships to understand fully the connections between sociality and fitness.animal model | animal social networks | yellow-bellied marmots B ehavioral ecologists have long viewed sociality and social relationships as adaptive traits shaped by evolution (1, 2). However, if we are to study the evolution of sociality and social relationships, there must be heritable variation in traits describing individual social behavior. Numerous studies have identified heritable variation in animal dispositions (3, 4), morphological characteristics, and behavioral traits (5) that may affect how individuals interact with conspecifics, yet the role of genetics in social interactions themselves is poorly understood. If traits affecting social interactions are heritable, we may expect measures of social relationships to be explained somewhat by additive genetic factors.There has been a recent upsurge in using animal social networks as tools for studying the ecology, evolution, and adaptive significance of sociality (6-8). Networks are based on interactions between individuals, and a variety of measures have been developed to quantify how connected individuals are with others in the group (9). Although studies of nonhuman species have explored the development of social networks (10) as well as the causes (11-13) and...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Heritable victimization and the benefits of agonistic relationships

Lea

Blumstein²,

Wey³

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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103

100

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“…There is also direct evidence that more aggressive males invest very little in parental care compared with reactive males (Duckworth & Badyaev 2007), although in other species aggressiveness can be related to higher maternal care (Benus & Röndig 1996) and maternal performance varies with maternal aggressiveness depending on the availability of resources (Boon et al 2007). Sociability has been found to affect dispersal (Cote & Clobert 2007;Blumstein et al 2009;Cote et al 2010), and is suspected to increase the chance of acquiring and transmitting parasites and diseases (Barber & Dingemanse 2010).…”

Section: Trait Interactions Contributingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personality and the emergence of the pace-of-life syndrome concept at the population level

Réale

Garant

Humphries

et al. 2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

1,194

1,433

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The pace-of-life syndrome (POLS) hypothesis specifies that closely related species or populations experiencing different ecological conditions should differ in a suite of metabolic, hormonal and immunity traits that have coevolved with the life-history particularities related to these conditions. Surprisingly, two important dimensions of the POLS concept have been neglected: (i) despite increasing evidence for numerous connections between behavioural, physiological and life-history traits, behaviours have rarely been considered in the POLS yet; (ii) the POLS could easily be applied to the study of covariation among traits between individuals within a population. In this paper, we propose that consistent behavioural differences among individuals, or personality, covary with life history and physiological differences at the within-population, interpopulation and interspecific levels. We discuss how the POLS provides a heuristic framework in which personality studies can be integrated to address how variation in personality traits is maintained within populations.

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“…Blumstein et al [75] focused on degree-the number of individuals one interacts with; and embeddedness-a statistic that describes how well integrated to the rest of the group an individual is. Because about half of our population of female yearlings disperse whereas almost all male yearlings disperse, we expected that social relationships would be relatively more important for females than for males.…”

Section: (B) Social Cohesion Is Established Through Age and Kin Strucmentioning

confidence: 99%

Yellow-bellied marmots: insights from an emergent view of sociality

Blumstein

2013

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Ecological factors explain variation in sociality both within and between species of marmots—large alpine ground squirrels. Fifty years of study, by me and my colleagues, of the yellow-bellied marmots ( Marmota flaviventris ) at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, near Crested Butte, CO, USA, has created opportunities to see how sociality changes with population and group size. Over the past decades, we have witnessed a natural experiment whereby the population tripled in size. If we view sociality as an emergent process, then demography acts as a constraint on interactions between individuals, and the threefold increase in population size should have consequences for group structure. We have used social network statistics to study the causes and consequences of social interactions by capitalizing on this demographic variation. Such an emergent view is ideally studied in an integrative Tinbergian way that focuses on both mechanism and function. We have determined that some social attributes are heritable, that social cohesion is established through age and kin structure, that well-embedded females (but not males) are less likely to disperse, and that there are fitness consequences of social attributes. Together, this integrative relationship-centred view expands on the traditional ecological model of sociality and offers a framework that can be applied to other systems.

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A test of the social cohesion hypothesis: interactive female marmots remain at home

Cited by 130 publications

References 32 publications

Heritable victimization and the benefits of agonistic relationships

Heritable victimization and the benefits of agonistic relationships

Personality and the emergence of the pace-of-life syndrome concept at the population level

Yellow-bellied marmots: insights from an emergent view of sociality

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