Yellow-bellied marmots: insights from an emergent view of sociality

Ecological factors explain variation in sociality both within and between species of marmots-large alpine ground squirrels. Fifty years of study, by me and my colleagues, of the yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, near Crested Butte, CO, USA, has created opportunities to see how sociality changes with population and group size. Over the past decades, we have witnessed a natural experiment whereby the population tripled in size. If we view sociality as an emergent process, then demography acts as a constraint on interactions between individuals, and the threefold increase in population size should have consequences for group structure. We have used social network statistics to study the causes and consequences of social interactions by capitalizing on this demographic variation. Such an emergent view is ideally studied in an integrative Tinbergian way that focuses on both mechanism and function. We have determined that some social attributes are heritable, that social cohesion is established through age and kin structure, that well-embedded females (but not males) are less likely to disperse, and that there are fitness consequences of social attributes. Together, this integrative relationship-centred view expands on the traditional ecological model of sociality and offers a framework that can be applied to other systems.