Agonistic and affiliative social relationships are associated with marmot docility but not boldness

Abstract

All animals must face predation risks at some points in their lives and individuals may vary in how much risk they are willing to accept. While it is well recognized that sociality is a way to manage risks, and social group size effects are well studied, the specific ways in which different types of social relationships influence individual risk response, such as number of interaction partners or the centrality of an individual's position in their group, are not well understood. We examined how yellow-bellied marmots, Marmota flaviventer, affiliative and agonistic social networks are associated with two repeatable measures of risk-related behaviour: boldness/risk taking, quantified from flight initiation distance to a simulated predator approach, and docility/risk aversion, quantified from response to human trapping and handling. We found that docile individuals were less socially integrated and that certain agonistic, but not affiliative, social network measures that quantified their positions in their networks were associated with individual docility. Animals in tighter agonistic networks were also those who were less docile after controlling for a number of other variables that could explain variation in these traits. We found that boldness was not correlated with an individual's agonistic or affiliative interactions. We conclude that some social network measures are part of a docility syndrome in yellow-bellied marmots. Similar studies in other systems are needed to better understand the importance of agonistic and affiliative relationships in selecting for behavioural syndromes.

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