Abstract
Water buffaloes are considered social animals and perform several activities on pasture, such as grazing, moving, standing, ruminating, wallowing, lying, and drinking. However, the way these animals form their social structure in the herd during each one of these activities is still unknown. Literature for water buffaloes has focused mainly on their productive characteristics, impact of grazing on wetlands and behavior during grazing but failed to address the way these animals form their social organization during their activities on pasture. In this study, the tools of social network analysis are used to analyze, detect, and depict the proximity patterns in water buffaloes' activities on pasture and the effect of their age and gender on them. We describe and interpret a series of global and local network indices, and show that the water buffaloes differentiate their social structure in their activities on pasture and that the animals' age and gender affect their interacting patterns, and provide a framework for the application of social network analysis on grazing animals' social behavioral studies. We expect that this framework could be used in future research to provide information regarding the social structure of other kinds of animals that graze in different forage and climatic environments and help animal breeders to improve their management practices.
Highlights
Social animals living in groups develop interdependent relationships among each other, which could be either positive that contribute in the formation of social bonds and animals’ welfare or negative, which could be associated with the dominance hierarchies in the animal group (Foris et al, 2019)
The Spearman correlation test revealed that the indices of density, number of components, and clustering coefficient were significantly correlated with the activities of water buffaloes on pasture (P < 0.01 and P < 0.05) (Fig. 2)
Our results are consistent with Bouissou (1980), who reported that free-ranging cattle living in natural environments enjoy greater cohesion and less antagonism than cattle in intensive breeding systems due to the limited competition for food resources and the ample personal space. Water buffaloes increased their contacts, as indicated by the degree and closeness centrality, demonstrating high levels of sociability. This is understandable, as water buffaloes are gregarious animals, and do they freely express their natural behavior during grazing but they interact with their conspecifics (Napolitano et al, 2013)
Summary
Social animals living in groups develop interdependent relationships among each other, which could be either positive (affiliative) that contribute in the formation of social bonds and animals’ welfare or negative (antagonistic), which could be associated with the dominance hierarchies in the animal group (Foris et al, 2019). In an animal population, the vertices may be individual animals or groups of animals, and the edges represent any type of social behavior, such as affiliative or antagonistic interactions (Krause et al., Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN)
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