Human activity likely affects giraffe's social networks

AUGUST 7, 2019

by Wiley

In a new Ethology study, researchers examined information on two adjacent giraffe populations in Kenya to determine whether human activities and high predation affect their social networks.

One study site was a premier tourist destination with a high volume of human activity in the form of tourist traffic and lodges, alongside a high density of lions that preferentially prey on giraffe calves. The other was a private wildlife conservancy with minimal human activity and no lion population.

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Rhinos' Communal Toilets Are Poo-Powered Social Networks

By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | January 11, 2017 06:29am ET

In the world of Harry Potter, wizards and witches communicate via the magical Floo Network. White rhinos, however, use a less magical and smellier communication system: a poo network.

Scientists recently discovered that white rhinos' dung contains status updates, with the feces odor broadcasting chemical signals about a rhino's age and sex, and about whether females are in heat or if males have staked out territory.

And forget about private messaging — rhinos use shared defecation areas to leave dispatches that can be "read" by all the other rhinos in their social group, according to a new study. 

Communication through urine is well known in many animal species, with males frequently spraying urine to mark their territories and establish dominance. But less is understood about the role dung might play in animals' social communication, the study authors reported.

The researchers suspected that dung likewise included chemicals that can relay specific messages related to mating and territory.

And they were particularly interested in animals that group together and poop together, defecating in communal sites and later making scents of all those mixed — and fragrant — olfactory signals.

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Just like humans, dolphins have complex social networks

Date:May 5, 2015

Source:Florida Atlantic University

Summary:They may not be on Facebook or Twitter, but dolphins do, in fact, form highly complex and dynamic networks of friends, according to a recent study. Dolphins are known for being highly social animals, and biologists took a closer look at the interactions between bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon and discovered how they mingle and with whom they spend their time.

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Social Networks Shape Monkey 'Culture' Too

June 27, 2013 — Of course Twitter and Facebook are all the rage, but the power of social networks didn't start just in the digital age. A new study on squirrel monkeys reported in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on June 27 finds that monkeys with the strongest social networks catch on fastest to the latest in foraging crazes. They are monkey trendsters.

The researchers, led by Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews, made the discovery by combining social network analysis with more traditional social learning experiments. By bringing the two together, they offer what they say is the first demonstration of how social networks may shape the spread of new cultural techniques. It's an approach they hope to see adopted in studies of other social animals.

"Our study shows that innovations do not just spread randomly in primate groups but, as in humans, are shaped by the monkeys' social networks," Whiten said.

Whiten, along with Nicolas Claidière, Emily Messer, and William Hoppitt, traced the monkeys' social networks by recording which monkeys spent time together in the vicinity of "artificial fruits" that could be manipulated to extract tempting food rewards. Sophisticated statistical analysis of those data revealed the monkeys' social networks, with some individuals situated at the heart of the network and others more on the outside. The researchers rated each of the monkeys on their "centrality," or social status in the network, with the highest ratings going to monkeys with the most connections to other well-connected individuals.

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Wanna be the leader? You gotta have friends

As ever, it's not what you know, but who: the structure of social networks, both online and off, seems to confer leadership on those with the most friends. Chains of command can form without members of a group – including the leader – ever needing to know who's on top.

It is often suggested that the most influential individuals are also the best connected, but the idea has been difficult to test in a real-world setting. Cedric Sueur of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), Belgium, and colleagues instead looked at how two species of macaque – Macaca tonkeana and Macaca mulatta – reach group decisions, such as when and where to move on.

They found that the leadership hierarchy in both species emerged via a simple rule-of-thumb: individuals followed the lead of their closest affiliates. Consequently, the individual with the most social connections becomes the leader in a self-reinforcing hierarchy.

There seem to be advantages to following the most socially connected individual. "If others in the group happen upon a bit of information then maybe [the socially connected leader] will have better access to that as well," says co-author Andrew King of the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, UK. That means the leader will tend to make better-informed decisions. "From a very simple rule of following your mates, you get these decisions that seem to be best," he says.

King is now experimenting with similar network structures in fish. "We hope that these are general principles that we're uncovering," he says.

George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the study, suggests that such structures may indeed be common. "A lot of the properties we see in food webs [the feeding connections between organisms] can be obtained with really simple assembly rules," he says.

Sugihara also highlights the importance of identifying similar patterns of connectivity in human society. A recent study of Facebook connections suggests that when it comes to people, more variables come into play. Gender, age and relationship status all help determine our level of influence over acquaintances.

Journal reference: Complex System Society Proceedings, in press




http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21994-wanna-be-the-leader-you-gotta-have-friends.html

'Facebook for Animals' Tested On Wild Great Tits

ScienceDaily (June 18, 2012) — A new way of analyzing the social networks that link individual animals to each other has been tested on wild great tits by Oxford University researchers.

How animals associate in groups can have important consequences in terms of the health and survival of both individuals and whole populations; influencing factors such as the spread of disease and the ability to find food or mates.

But revealing the networks underlying animal societies is a challenge when a large amount of fieldwork data consists of a long stream of automated observations of the times and locations of individuals, leaving scientists to try and reconstruct the 'big picture' of how individuals are connected.

The new approach can automatically identify periods of intense social activity within a large number of observations -- in this example around one million observations of wild great tits (Parus major). This makes it possible to examine these periods in greater detail and calculate which individuals are real 'friends', rather than random passers-by, and even which are looking to pair up and mate.

A report of the research is published in this week's Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120618150519.htm