Functional social structure in baboons: Modeling interactions between social and environmental structure in group-level foraging
Authored by Tyler R Bonnell, S Peter Henzi, Louise Barrett
Date Published: 2019
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2018.10.011
Sponsors:
No sponsors listed
Platforms:
Repast
Java
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
In mobile social groups, cohesion is thought to be driven by patterns of
attraction at both the individual and group level. In long-lived species
with high group stability and repeated interactions, such as baboons,
individual-to-individual attractions have the potential to play a large
role in group cohesion and overall movement patterns. In previous work,
we found that the patterning of inter-individual attraction gave rise to
an emergent group-level structure, whereby a core of more influential,
inter-dependent individuals exerted a unidirectional influence on the
movements of peripheral animals. Here, we use agent-based modeling of
baboon groups to investigate whether this core periphery structure has
any functional consequences for foraging behavior. By varying individual
level attractions, we produced baboon groups that contained influence
structures that varied from more to less centralized. Our results
suggest that varying centrality affects both the ability of the group to
detect resource structure in the environment, as well as the ability of
the group to exploit these resources. Our models predict that foraging
groups with more centralized social structures will show a reduction in
detection and an increase in exploitation of resources in their
environment, and will produce more extreme foraging outcomes. More
generally, our results highlight how a group's internal social structure
can result in mobile social animals being able to more (or less)
effectively exploit environmental structure, and capitalize on the
distribution of resources. In addition, our agent-based model can be
used to generate testable predictions that can be tested among the
extant baboon allotaxa. This will add value to the existing body of work
on responses to local ecology, as well as providing a means to test
hypotheses relating to the phylogeography of the baboons and, by
analogy, shed light on patterns of hominin evolution in time and space.
(C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Tags
Complexity
differentiation
Social Network
Decision-Making
Foraging
ecology
collective behavior
Memory
Movement ecology
Animal groups
Trade-offs
Habitat
use
Baboons
Core-periphery
Determining interaction rules