Examining the effects of environmental variation on sociality in yellow-bellied marmots utilizing a within-individual centering approach
Abstract
The relationship between environmental variation and fitness has been well established. However, fitness may also be indirectly impacted by environmental variation through the modulation of social behavior. We aim to quantify the effects of environmental variation on sociality, specifically social relationships, with the knowledge that the subsequent changes in social behavior can have fitness consequences. Previous studies on sociality have often relied on annual analyses and, by focusing on a single year of social behaviors, have been unable to account for an individual’s lifetime patterns. A within-individual centering approach offers the ability to examine how sociality changes over an individual's lifetime and account for an individual's lifetime patterns. By utilizing the within-individual centering approach, we are able to utilize an individual’s lifetime average social position as a baseline to quantify the deviation in that individual's levels of social relationships each year. We quantified the social relationships of a well-studied population of yellow-bellied marmots using six social network traits and fitted a series of Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) to quantify the relationship between environmental variation and sociality. We found statistically significant relationships between body condition and rainfall on select social network traits for females and males, respectively. Additionally, group size was shown to impact a suite of social network traits for both males and females. Social and demographic variables seem to have larger impacts on an individual’s social plasticity than environmentally driven variables in this system. Following work should investigate how social context drives these important deviations in individual behavior.
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References (38)
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