Dynamic network partnerships and social contagion drive cooperation

Abstract

These authors contributed equally to this work.Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://dx.Both reciprocity and positive assortment (like with like) are predicted to promote the evolution of cooperation, yet how partners influence each other's behaviour within dynamic networks is not well understood. One way to test this question is to partition phenotypic variation into differences among individuals in the expression of cooperative behaviour (the 'direct effect'), and plasticity within individuals in response to the social environment (the 'indirect effect'). A positive correlation between these two sources of variation, such that more cooperative individuals elicit others to cooperate, is predicted to facilitate social contagion and selection on cooperative behaviour. Testing this hypothesis is challenging, however, because it requires repeated measures of behaviour across a dynamic social landscape. Here, we use an automated data-logging system to quantify the behaviour of 179 wire-tailed manakins, birds that form cooperative male-male coalitions, and we use multiple-membership models to test the hypothesis that dynamic network partnerships shape within-individual variation in cooperative behaviour. Our results show strong positive correlations between a bird's own sociality and his estimated effect on his partners, consistent with the hypothesis that cooperation begets cooperation. These findings support the hypothesis that social contagion can facilitate selection for cooperative behaviour within social networks.

Workflow for constructing social networks from automated telemetry systems

“…Other researchers could adapt this same approach to ask questions specific to a particular system. For example, Dakin & Ryder (2018, 2020 used a similar automated telemetry system to study the social network dynamics of cooperatively displaying wire-tailed manakins (Pipra filicauda). In those studies, the base stations were placed within display sites, and signal strength was calibrated to a much smaller spatial scale than used in our study, allowing them to infer instances of cooperative displays that occurred on a single branch.…”

“…Alternatively, one could count the number of time windows during which two birds were detected together (the number of association "bouts"; Dakin & Ryder, 2018, 2020. There are many other ways that one can infer strengths of associations, and we encourage researchers to explore these possibilities.…”

“…Such approaches are now routinely used to quantify and analyze patterns and dynamics of social associations across space and time (Pinter-Wollman et al, 2014;Farine & Whitehead, 2015). The integration of automated datalogging with more advanced approaches to social network analyses has led to key discoveries such as the rapid spread of experimentally introduced information through wild populations (Aplin et al, 2015), the reorganization of social networks in response to a resource pulse (St Clair et al, 2015), and fine-scale dynamics in social contagion of cooperation (Dakin & Ryder, 2018).…”

“…Because different technologies collect a variety of information, there is no one-size-fitsall method for converting empirical data into social networks (Smith & Pinter-Wollman In Press). Types of automated datalogging systems that have been used to build social networks of free-living animals include: (1) geographic positioning system tags (Sih et al, 2018), 2proximity loggers (St. Clair et al, 2015), (3) radio frequency identification (RFID) tags , and (4) automated telemetry systems (Dakin & Ryder 2018, 2020. Methodological standards for inferring social networks from data have been established for some methods such as RFID (Psorakis et al, 2015) but not others.…”

Longitudinal dynamics and behavioural correlates of telomeres in male wire‐tailed manakins

“…Both status classes perform male-male coordinated displays (see movie S1 in Dakin & Ryder, 2018) and these displays form the basis of long-term coalition partnerships (Díaz-Muñoz et al, 2014;Ryder et al, 2008). A floater's social behaviour is positively correlated with the probability of becoming a territory-holder (Ryder et al, 2008) and obtaining a territory is a strong prerequisite for male reproduction.…”