Abstract
Dominance behaviours have been collected for many groups of animals since 1922 and serve as a foundation for research on social behaviour and social structure. Despite a wealth of data from the last century of research on dominance hierarchies, these data are only rarely used for comparative insight. Here, we aim to facilitate comparative studies of the structure and function of dominance hierarchies by compiling published dominance interaction datasets from the last 100 years of work. This compiled archive includes 436 datasets from 190 studies of 367 unique groups (mean group size 13.8, s.d. = 13.4) of 135 different species, totalling over 243 000 interactions. These data are presented in an R package alongside relevant metadata and a tool for subsetting the archive based on biological or methodological criteria. In this paper, we explain how to use the archive, discuss potential limitations of the data, and reflect on best practices in publishing dominance data based on our experience in assembling this dataset. This archive will serve as an important resource for future comparative studies and will promote the development of general unifying theories of dominance in behavioural ecology that can be grounded in testing with empirical data.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies’.
Highlights
Dominance is a pervasive feature of animal societies that can have dramatic effects on individual fitness
The dominance hierarchy is the group-level social structure that emerges from the network of dominance relationships, and various ranking methods have been developed to infer individual position in the dominance hierarchy based on the outcomes of observed agonistic interactions [194–196]
The archive includes calculated measures of the structure of dominance relationships for each dataset: directional consistency [145], triangle transitivity [206], linearity [226] and steepness [110]. These summary statistics are useful for comparative insight into the ecological and evolutionary determinants of hierarchy structure [206,207,217,227,228]
Summary
Dominance is a pervasive feature of animal societies that can have dramatic effects on individual fitness. Agonistic interactions—the individual aggressive and submissive signalling behaviours that underlie dominance hierarchies—are some of the most commonly collected behaviours across studies of animal [1–190] These interactions are typically used to understand how within-group competition structures animal societies [191,192]. Agonistic interaction datasets are typically collected to address questions about the behaviour of a specific species, these datasets have strong potential for comparative insight about the evolution of sociality in the face of competition. These data have only rarely been applied in a comparative framework to address evolutionary questions about competition and hierarchy structure (but see [206,207,214–217]). The data are presented in an R package alongside metadata and tools for filtering the archive by its associated metadata (see electronic supplementary material for an instructional vignette)
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