Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 82, Issue 1, July 2011, Pages 29-38
Animal Behaviour

The impact of social networks on animal collective motion

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.04.011Get rights and content

Many group-living animals show social preferences for relatives, familiar conspecifics or individuals of similar attributes such as size, personality or sex. How such preferences could affect the collective motion of animal groups has been rather unexplored. We present a general model of collective animal motion that includes social connections as preferential reactions between individuals. Our conceptual examples illustrate the possible impact of underlying social networks on the collective motion of animals. Our approach shows that the structure of these networks could influence: (1) the cohesion of groups; (2) the spatial position of individuals within groups; and (3) the hierarchical dynamics within such groups. We argue that the position of individuals within a social network and the social network structure of populations could have important fitness implications for individual animals. Counterintuitive results from our conceptual examples show that social structures can result in unexpected group dynamics. This sharpens our understanding of the way in which collective movement can be interpreted as a result of social interactions.

Section snippets

Methods

In this section we describe and justify our modelling approach and some key methods.

Group Cohesion (hypothesis 1)

To explore possible effects of social network structure on group cohesion and alignment, we generated five different underlying social networks that each captures different illustrative structural elements (Fig. 1). The network structures we used were: (1) fully connected where all connections have the same strength (i.e. no structure); (2) two components; (3) three components; (4) a key individual (hub) that is strongly connected to all others; (5) randomly created strong connections (Erdös &

Discussion

We have presented a model of animal collective motion that includes social network structures. Our simulations suggest that social preferences could lead to spatial association of socially connected individuals and could also impact on group fission and fusion. Furthermore, our model leads to the testable predictions that animals with many social links can be found closer to the centre of moving groups. Finally, our model shows that social preferences alone could lead to hierarchical group

Acknowledgments

We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments that have greatly improved the manuscript. N.W.F.B.’s research is supported by the Natural Environment Research Council. D.W.F. and A.J.W. are supported by RCUK Fellowships.

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