Emergent social structure is typically not associated with survival in a facultatively social mammal

Abstract

For social animals, group social structure has important consequences for disease and information spread. While prior studies showed individual connectedness within a group has fitness consequences, less is known about the fitness consequences of group social structure for the individuals who comprise the group. Using a long-term dataset on a wild population of facultatively social yellow-bellied marmots (<i>Marmota flaviventer</i>), we showed social structure had largely no relationship with survival, suggesting consequences of individual social phenotypes may not scale to the group social phenotype. An observed relationship for winter survival suggests a potentially contrasting direction of selection between the group and previous research on the individual level; less social individuals, but individuals in more social groups experience greater winter survival. This work provides valuable insights into evolutionary implications across social phenotypic scales.

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