Social Security: Do Individuals in Tight-Knit Social Groups Perceive Greater Security?

Abstract

Antipredator behavior is influenced by many factors including group size. Group size effects are seen when animals in larger social groups allocate less time to antipredator vigilance while foraging, but group size alone does not capture the diversity and complexity of sociality and behavior. An individual’s ‘sense of security’, or their perception of predation risk, is also influenced by an individual’s social behavior, but it is unknown is whether a group’s social structure – the pattern of all social interactions in a group – could explain variation in an individual’s perceptions of security. Using time allocated to vigilance during foraging and flight initiation distance (FID) as two measures of an individual’s sense of security, we explored whether individual yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventer) in tightly connected social groups looked less while foraging and had shorter FIDs compared to individual marmots in less- connected social groups. Using linear mixed effect models, we found modest support for the Social Security Hypothesis as individuals in more socially reciprocal groups spent less time looking for predators while foraging. We found no measures of group social structure explained variation in FID. We also found that measures of the immediate environment (number of individuals within 10 meters for vigilance and distance from burrow and alert distance for FID) had effect sizes an order of magnitude greater than the social network measures, suggesting an individual’s immediate environment has more of an impact on their antipredator behavior than the structure of their social group.

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