Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 107, Issue 50, Pages 21587-21592Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1009882107
Keywords
animal model; animal social networks; yellow-bellied marmots
Categories
Funding
- University of California Los Angeles Academic Senate and Division of Life Sciences
- National Geographic Society
- National Science Foundation [NSF-IDBR-0754247, DBI 0242960, 0731346]
- Div Of Biological Infrastructure
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0731346] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Here, we present estimates of heritability and selection on network traits in a single population, allowing us to address the evolutionary potential of social behavior and the poorly understood link between sociality and fitness. To evolve, sociality must have some heritable basis, yet the heritability of social relationships is largely unknown. Recent advances in both social network analyses and quantitative genetics allow us to quantify attributes of social relationships and estimate their heritability in free-living populations. Our analyses addressed a variety of measures (in-degree, out-degree, attractiveness, expansiveness, embeddedness, and betweenness), and we hypothesized that traits reflecting relationships controlled by an individual (i.e., those that the individual initiated or were directly involved in) would be more heritable than those based largely on the behavior of conspecifics. Identifying patterns of heritability and selection among related traits may provide insight into which types of relationships are important in animal societies. As expected, we found that variation in indirect measures was largely explained by nongenetic variation. Yet, surprisingly, traits capturing initiated interactions do not possess significant additive genetic variation, whereas measures of received interactions are heritable. Measures describing initiated aggression and position in an agonistic network are under selection (0.3 < vertical bar S vertical bar < 0.4), although advantageous trait values are not inherited by offspring. It appears that agonistic relationships positively influence fitness and seemingly costly or harmful ties may, in fact, be beneficial. Our study highlights the importance of studying agonistic as well as affiliative relationships to understand fully the connections between sociality and fitness.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available