Kin in space: social viscosity in a spatially and genetically substructured network

Abstract

Population substructuring is a fundamental aspect of animal societies. A growing number of theoretical studies recognize that who-meets-whom is not random, but rather determined by spatial relationships or illustrated by social networks. Structural properties of large highly dynamic social systems are notoriously difficult to unravel. Network approaches provide powerful ways to analyse the intricate relationships between social behaviour, dispersal strategies and genetic structure. Applying network analytical tools to a colony of the highly gregarious Galápagos sea lion (Zalophus wollebaeki ), we find several genetic clusters that correspond to spatially determined 'network communities'. Overall relatedness was low, and genetic structure in the network can be interpreted as an emergent property of philopatry and seems not to be primarily driven by targeted interactions among highly related individuals in family groups. Nevertheless, social relationships between directly adjacent individuals in the network were stronger among genetically more similar individuals. Taken together, these results suggest that even small differences in the degree of relatedness can influence behavioural decisions. This raises the fascinating prospect that kin selection may also apply to low levels of relatedness within densely packed animal groups where less obvious co-operative interactions such as increased tolerance and stress reduction are important.

Proximity loggers on amphibious mammals: a new method to study social relations in their terrestrial habitat

“…With this proviso, proximity recorders provide a major improvement of our ability to collect data on social interactions independent of an individual's observability. The methodology can be employed to obtain not only insights into frequency and duration of social relationships among males as described here, but could also be useful to record data on social networks (Wolf et al 2007, Whitehead 2008, Krause et al 2009), site fidelity (Pomeroy et al 2000), mating interactions, sexual segregation (Staniland 2005), relationships among kin within a colony (Wolf & Trillmich 2008), preferential assortment among breeding females (Pomeroy et al 2000), as well as fostering behaviour (Boness et al 1998), parent− offspring conflict (Trivers 1974) or disease transmission (Böhm et al 2008). …”

Sexual networks: measuring sexual selection in structured, polyandrous populations

“…However, this approach too suffers from some rigidity. First, community detection techniques fail to capture variation in interactions within individual communities (figure 1), which can be considerable [36,42], and which may have a large impact on the variation in competitive environments experienced between individuals. Second, this approach does not explicitly account for weak ties between communities (figure 1).…”

Toward an organismal, integrative, and iterative phylogeography

“…graph theory). (53)(54)(55)(56)(57) Networks have specific properties (such as stability, connectivity, motifs, position or modularity). The properties define the network behavior and the structure of the system.…”

“…(3) Complexity in natural systems has been successfully incorporated and analyzed in different contexts [e.g. gene and metabolic networks, (52) ecological networks, (53) social networks, (54) population dynamics (55) ]. In all these studies, complexity is represented and studied through network theory.…”