Extending the social cohesion hypothesis: Is group cohesion associated with dispersal?

Abstract

Dispersal is an important decision for an individual to make which may influence individual fitness as well as population viability. Prior work has shown that dispersal decisions can be influenced by an individual’s position in their social network (the social cohesion hypothesis), but the dispersal consequences of group social structure have not been explored. We quantified the affiliative and agonistic social network structure of female yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer), a facultatively social ground-dwelling squirrel, where about half of all females disperse, and using mixed-effects models, asked whether group structure was associated with dispersal. We found no support for the hypothesis that affiliative group structure explained any variation in a marmot’s decision to disperse but marmots in groups with less agonistic centralization were less likely to disperse. The former finding may result from cognitive limitations on social knowledge while the later finding might reflect that individuals in less agonistically integrated groups are less likely to be reproductively suppressed. Regardless, these results raise important questions about the limits of social knowledge and suggest the social cohesion hypothesis – more social individuals remain at home – does not scale to the level of the group. Further work is required to determine whether dispersal decisions in obligately social species are influenced by knowledge of their group structure.

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