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Animal groups are often organized hierarchically, with dominant individuals gaining priority access to resources and reproduction over subordinate individuals. Initial dominance hierarchy formation may be influenced by multiple interacting factors, including an animal's individual attributes, conventions and self-organizing social dynamics. After establishment, hierarchies are typically maintained over the long-term because individuals save time, energy and reduce the risk of injury by recognizing and abiding by established dominance relationships. A separate set of behaviours are used to maintain dominance relationships within groups, including behaviours that stabilize ranks (punishment, threats, behavioural asymmetry), as well as signals that provide information about dominance rank (individual identity signals, signals of dominance). In this review, we describe the behaviours used to establish and maintain dominance hierarchies across different taxa and types of societies. We also review opportunities for future research including: testing how self-organizing behavioural dynamics interact with other factors to mediate dominance hierarchy formation, measuring the long-term stability of social hierarchies and the factors that disrupt hierarchy stability, incorporating phenotypic plasticity into our understanding of the behavioural dynamics of hierarchies and considering how cognition coevolves with the behaviours used to establish and maintain hierarchies. 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’.
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Inferring longitudinal hierarchies: Framework and methods for studying the dynamics of dominance
Abstract Social inequality is a consistent feature of animal societies, often manifesting as dominance hierarchies, in which each individual is characterized by a dominance rank denoting its place in the network of competitive relationships among group members. Most studies treat dominance hierarchies as static entities despite their true longitudinal, and sometimes highly dynamic, nature.To guide study of the dynamics of dominance, we propose the concept of a longitudinal hierarchy: the characterization of a single, latent hierarchy and its dynamics over time. Longitudinal hierarchies describe the hierarchy position (r) and dynamics (∆) associated with each individual as a property of its interaction data, the periods into which these data are divided based on a period delineation rule (p) and the method chosen to infer the hierarchy. Hierarchy dynamics result from both active (∆a) and passive (∆p) processes. Methods that infer longitudinal hierarchies should optimize accuracy of rank dynamics as well as of the rank orders themselves, but no studies have yet evaluated the accuracy with which different methods infer hierarchy dynamics.We modify three popular ranking approaches to make them better suited for inferring longitudinal hierarchies. Our three “informed” methods assign ranks that are informed by data from the prior period rather than calculating ranksde novoin each observation period and use prior knowledge of dominance correlates to inform placement of new individuals in the hierarchy. These methods are provided in an R package.Using both a simulated dataset and a long‐term empirical dataset from a species with two distinct sex‐based dominance structures, we compare the performance of these methods and their unmodified counterparts. We show that choice of method has dramatic impacts on inference of hierarchy dynamics via differences in estimates of∆a. Methods that calculate ranksde novoin each period overestimate hierarchy dynamics, but incorporation of prior information leads to more accurately inferred∆a. Of the modified methods, Informed MatReorder infers the most conservative estimates of hierarchy dynamics and Informed Elo infers the most dynamic hierarchies.This work provides crucially needed conceptual framing and methodological validation for studying social dominance and its dynamics.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1853934
- PAR ID:
- 10461144
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Animal Ecology
- Volume:
- 88
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0021-8790
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 521-536
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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