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Abstract
Intraspecific social behavior can be influenced by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. While much research has focused on how characteristics of individuals influence their roles in social networks, we were interested in the role that landscape structure plays in animal sociality at both individual (local) and population (global) levels. We used female white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in Illinois, USA, to investigate the potential effect of landscape on social network structure by weighting the edges of seasonal social networks with association rate (based on proximity inferred from GPS collar data). At the local level, we found that sociality among female deer in neighboring social groups (n = 36) was mainly explained by their home range overlap, with two exceptions: 1) during fawning in an area of mixed forest and grassland, deer whose home ranges had low forest connectivity were more social than expected; and 2) during the rut in an area of intensive agriculture, deer inhabiting home ranges with high amount and connectedness of agriculture were more social than expected. At the global scale, we found that deer populations (n = 7) in areas with highly connected forest-agriculture edge, a high proportion of agriculture, and a low proportion of forest tended to have higher weighted network closeness, although low sample size precluded statistical significance. This result implies that infectious disease could spread faster in deer populations inhabiting such landscapes. Our work advances the general understanding of animal social networks, demonstrating how landscape features can underlie differences in social behavior both within and among wildlife social networks.
Highlights
Social behavior can provide ecological and evolutionary benefits to animals at both individual and population levels
A We weighted network edges with the residuals of the linear relationship between association rate and log home range overlap. b 1 Jan– 10 Mar. c Mean number of simultaneous locations across dyads. d To compare network closeness among networks of different sizes, we subsampled our networks such that they contained 4 nodes
During fawning, when association rates tended to be lower (S3 Table), both the connectivity of forest and home range overlap best predicted deer sociality in Carbondale (Table 3): female deer in highly connected forest tended to be less social with their neighbors (S4 Table; note that we did not find an effect of landcover or home range overlap on deer sociality in Lake Shelbyville during fawning (Table 4))
Summary
Social behavior can provide ecological and evolutionary benefits to animals at both individual and population levels. Individuals that are more social tend to be in better body condition (e.g., African elephants (Loxodonta africana). Landscape connectivity and social network structure [2]), experience higher pairing success (e.g., male house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) [3]), have higher survival (bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops sp.) [4]) and reproductive success (e.g., long-tailed manakin (Chiroxiphia linearis) [5], feral horses (Equus caballus) [6], bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) [7]), and have offspring with higher survival rates (e.g., savannah baboons (Papio cynocephalus) [8]). The social transmission of parasites and infectious diseases can impair host survival and reproduction [9,10]. The evolution and maintenance of sociality is likely the result of species-specific and habitat-specific trade-offs between the costs and benefits of being social [11,12]
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