Social attributes and associated performance measures in marmots: bigger male bullies and weakly affiliating females have higher annual reproductive success

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

128

103

Social living goes hand in hand with communication, but the details of this relationship are rarely simple. Complex communication may be described by attributes as diverse as a species' entire repertoire, signallers' individualistic signatures, or complex acoustic phenomena within single calls. Similarly, attributes of social complexity are diverse and may include group size, social role diversity, or networks of interactions and relationships. How these different attributes of social and communicative complexity co-evolve is an active question in behavioural ecology. Sciurid rodents (ground squirrels, prairie dogs and marmots) provide an excellent model system for studying these questions. Sciurid studies have found that demographic role complexity predicts alarm call repertoire size, while social group size predicts alarm call individuality. Along with other taxa, sciurids reveal an important insight: different attributes of sociality are linked to different attributes of communication. By breaking social and communicative complexity down to different attributes, focused studies can better untangle the underlying evolutionary relationships and move us closer to a comprehensive theory of how sociality and communication evolve.

Section: Attributes Of Sociality Attributes Of Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolving communicative complexity: insights from rodents and beyond

Pollard

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

128

103

“…Second, they play during the first 2 years of their lives (as pups-animals less than a year old and as yearlingsanimals 1 year old [27,28]), and this creates an opportunity to test two complementary hypotheses (see below). Third, our population has been studied since 1962, which enables us to draw upon a wealth of information about their long-term social interactions [29,30] and the function of dominance [31], as well as an extensive observational dataset [32]. Fourth, a previous study of yellow-bellied marmot play [28] found that playing marmots failed to self-handicap themselves (which means that larger and potentially more dominant individuals who were actively holding down or chasing another individual did not suddenly reverse roles), suggesting that play might enhance competitive skills and is probably involved in dominance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early play may predict later dominance relationships in yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris)

Chung²,

Smith

2013

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Play has been defined as apparently functionless behaviour, yet since play is costly, models of adaptive evolution predict that it should have some beneficial function (or functions) that outweigh its costs. We provide strong evidence for a long-standing, but poorly supported hypothesis: that early social play is practice for later dominance relationships. We calculated the relative dominance rank by observing the directional outcome of playful interactions in juvenile and yearling yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) and found that these rank relationships were correlated with later dominance ranks calculated from agonistic interactions, however, the strength of this relationship attenuated over time. While play may have multiple functions, one of them may be to establish later dominance relationships in a minimally costly way.

“…Potential proximate drivers of social variation include variation in the hypothalamic pituitary axis and variation in personality. Previous analyses found no relationship between measures of circulating stress hormones and network traits [78], and current studies examine the degree of individual consistency in network traits.…”

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

confidence: 99%

“…One of the more exciting recent studies that illustrate our relationship-based approach to studying sociality demonstrated that different social attributes differentially affect reproductive success [78]. In this study, we used factor analysis to reduce correlated attributes to four factors that we interpreted as those that measure connectivity, affiliation strength, victimization and bullying.…”

Section: (D) Network Position Has Fitness Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2013

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

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.