Relationships matter: How the social environment affects individual fitness-related behaviors

Abstract

Individuals respond to predators through an array of anti-predator behaviors that can be influenced by their social environment, specifically through protection from predators or by altering risk-resource trade-offs through competitive exclusion from resources. While social effects like group size are well studied, the specific ways in which different types of relationships, such as number of interaction partners or centrality in their group, influence consistent anti-predator behaviors is less understood. However, the effects of social relationships on behavior are not uniform between species or even between individuals. Here, we examined how an individual’s affiliative and agonistic social relationships impacted two personality traits related to anti-predator behavior (boldness and docility) in yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer ), a facultatively social species with unusual negative impacts of affiliative relationships. We found that docile individuals were less involved in aggressive interactions either by avoiding or being excluded from aggressive interactions. Boldness was not associated with aggression, suggesting that individuals are either not resource limited by social aggression or are not willing to risk more predator exposure to secure those resources. Affiliative relationships were not associated with docility or boldness, contributes to other findings that marmots have a limited sense of social security from affiliative relationships.

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