Abstract
Sociality in animal populations is a continuum, and interactions between conspecifics are meaningful for all vertebrates. Ignorance of social structures can lead to misunderstanding their ecology and, consequently, to unsuccessful species management. Here, we combined genetic and spatial data on radio-collared brown bears (Ursus arctos) to investigate kin-related home range overlap and kin-related centroid distance within central and eastern Finland. We found that the extent of home range overlap was positively correlated with relatedness among adult females. In addition, home range centroid distance decreased as relatedness increased. Moreover, there were significant differences between the two studied regions: female brown bears in central Finland were more closely related to each other, and the sizes of their home ranges were larger than those in eastern Finland. The smaller home ranges and lower degree of relatedness among bears in eastern Finland might be a result of the substantially higher hunting pressure in the area, combined with immigration of new unrelated individuals from Russia.
Highlights
Social structure is a key concept in animal population ecology and should be taken into account in the conservation and management of populations
According to the GPS tracking results, we found strong evidence that the female brown bear home range sizes differ between the two study areas
As we found first order relationships only from central Finland, this indicates that something prevents the normal social structure of female brown bears to emerge in eastern Finland
Summary
Social structure is a key concept in animal population ecology and should be taken into account in the conservation and management of populations. Active social interactions associated with living in groups may provide higher survival rates through more effective food acquisition strategies and a lower risk of individual predation, among other factors [1]. These types of benefit-based complex social structures are frequently observed in groupliving species, such as wolves, horses and whales [2,3,4]. Most carnivores live a solitary, non-cooperative lifestyle, having very little interaction with conspecifics beyond the mating season [5] Studying their social structure can be a tedious task, especially for species that are very mobile and live in low densities, rendering data acquisition very challenging. Telemetry tracking has eased the collection of data, and combined with genetic studies, it has promoted the understanding of such social structures
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