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the conduit to scientists and specialists that empowers people to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises, their cultures and their homes.
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| archived words from the wise: Dr David Lusseau |
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I am trying to understand the principles governing the dynamics and evolution of interactions in complex adaptive systems. I am particularly focussing on social interactions in animal populations and I am interested in understanding how environmental variability, both natural and anthropogenic, influences them. |
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| Posted: 2007 December 30 |
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Contact http://www.lusseau.org/ |
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| wise words |
Identifying the role that animals play in their social networks
Techniques recently developed for the analysis of human social networks are applied to the social network of bottlenose dolphins living in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand. We identify communities and subcommunities within the dolphin population and present evidence that sex- and age-related homophily play a role in the formation of clusters of preferred companionship. We also identify brokers who act as links between sub-communities and who appear to be crucial to the social cohesion of the population as a whole. The network is found to be similar to human social networks in some respects but different in some others, such as the level of assortative mixing by degree within the population. This difference elucidates some of the means by which the network forms and evolves.
A note from whales-online.org This paper is originally published within the Proceedings of the Royal Society
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Related PDFs
Identifying the role that animals play in their social networks |
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