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5,666 results for “Social”
Social network position experiences more variable selection than weaponry in wild subpopulations of forked fungus beetles
<p>1. The phenotypic expression and fitness consequences of behaviors that are exhibited during social interactions are especially sensitive to their local social context. This context-dependence is expected to generate more variation in the sign and magnitude of selection on social behavior than that experienced by static characters like morphology. Relatively few studies, however, have examined selection on behavioral traits in multiple populations. 2. We estimated sexual selection in the wild to determine if the strength and form of selection on social phenotypes is more variable than that on morphology. 3. We compared selection gradients on social network position, body size, and weaponry of male forked fungus beetles (Bolitotherus cornutus) as they influenced mating success across nine natural subpopulations. 4. Male horn length consistently experienced positive sexual selection. However, the sign and magnitude of selection on individual measures of network centrality (strength and betweenness) differed significantly among subpopulations. Moreover, selection on social behaviors occurred at local scale ("soft selection"), whereas selection on horn length occurred at the metapopulation scale ("hard selection"). 5. These results indicate that an individual with a given social phenotype could experience different fitness consequences depending on the network it occupies. While individuals seem to be unable to escape the fitness effects of their morphology, they may have the potential to mediate the pressures of selection on behavioral phenotypes by moving among subpopulations or altering social connections within a network.</p>
Data from: Detecting and quantifying social transmission using network-based diffusion analysis
<p>1. Although social learning capabilities are taxonomically widespread, demonstrating that freely interacting animals (whether wild or captive) rely on social learning has proved remarkably challenging.</p> <p>2. Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) offers a means for detecting social learning using observational data on freely interacting groups. Its core assumption is that if a target behaviour is socially transmitted, then its spread should follow the connections in a social network that reflects social learning opportunities.</p> <p>3. Here, we provide a comprehensive guide for using NBDA. We first introduce its underlying mathematical framework and present the types of questions that NBDA can address. We then guide researchers through the process of: selecting an appropriate social network for their research question; determining which NBDA variant should be used; and incorporating other variables that may impact asocial and social learning. Finally, we discuss how to interpret an NBDA model's output and provide practical recommendations for model selection.</p> <p>4. Throughout, we highlight extensions to the basic NBDA framework, including incorporation of dynamic networks to capture changes in social relationships during a diffusion and using a multi-network NBDA to estimate information flow across multiple types of social relationship.</p> <p>5. Alongside this information, we provide worked examples and tutorials demonstrating how to perform analyses using the newly developed NBDA package written in the R programming language.</p>
Title Digitized Social Interactions: Reaching Beyond the Limits of the Naked Eye
<p>The complexity and non-linear dynamics of socio-motor phenomena underlying social interactions are often missed by observation methods that attempt to capture, describe, and rate the exchange in real time. Unknowingly to the rater, socio-motor behaviors of a dyad influence each other through implicit mirroring and shared cohesiveness that escape the naked eye. Implicit in their ratings nonetheless is the assumption that the other participant of the social dyad has an identical nervous system as that of the interlocutor, and that sensory-motor information is processed similarly by both agents’ brains. What happens when this is not the case? We here use the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) to formally study social dyadic interactions, at the macro- and micro-level of behaviors, by combining observation with digital data from wearables. We find that integrating subjective and objective data reveals fundamental new ways to improve standard clinical tools more generally into outcome measures of human behaviors and treatment effectiveness.</p> <p>This Supplementary Material contains the results from analyzing the gyroscope data in parallel with the results presented in the main paper from the linear acceleration data. Further the video (animation) explains the advantages of using a hybrid model of pencil and paper with digital biomarkers to advance clinical and basic research.</p>
Epigenetic Profiling of Social Communication Trajectories and Co-occurring Mental Health Problems: A Prospective, Methylome-wide Association Study
<p>While previous studies suggest that both genetic and environmental factors play an important role in the development of autism-related traits, little is known about potential biological mechanisms underlying these associations. Using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), we examined prospective associations between DNA methylation (DNAm: N-birth=804, N-age7=877) and trajectories of social communication deficits (8-17 years). Methylomic variation at three loci across the genome (false discovery rate=0.048) differentiated children following high (n=80) versus low (n=724) trajectories of social communication deficits. This differential DNAm was specific to the neonatal period and not observed at age 7. Associations between DNAm and trajectory membership remained robust after controlling for co-occurring mental health problems (i.e., hyperactivity/inattention, conduct problems). The three loci identified at birth were not replicated in the Generation R Study. However, to the best of our knowledge, ALSPAC is the only study to date that is prospective enough to examine DNAm in relation to longitudinal trajectories of social communication deficits from late childhood to late adolescence. Although the present findings might point to potentially novel sites that differentiate between a high versus low trajectory of social communication deficits, the results should be considered tentative until further replicated.</p> <p>This dataset contains summary statistics for the methylome-wide association study using DNAm data collected from individuals at birth.</p> <p>Upload of this dataset was completed by The EWAS Catalog team. The data can be queried along with hundreds of other EWAS at ewascatalog.org. To upload your EWAS summary statistics and have a zenodo DOI generated for you go to ewascatalog.org/upload</p>
Social-like responses are inducible in the asocial and blind Mexican cavefish despite the continued exhibition of strong repetitive behavior
<p>Demo code and demo video files for the manuscript of "Social-like responses are inducible in the asocial and blind Mexican cavefish despite the continued exhibition of strong repetitive behavior." This zip file contains three folders, representing (1) ImageJ script for background subtraction; (2) python script to adjust swapped IDs in the result of idTracker analysis; and (3) MatLab script for detecting the social interactions</p>
Dataset for the submission entitled: Journal article publishing in the social sciences and humanities: a comparison of Web of Science coverage for five European countries
<p>Dataset for the manuscript submission entitled: Journal article publishing in the social sciences and humanities: a comparison of Web of Science coverage for five European countries.</p>
Data from: Social selectivity in aging wild chimpanzees
<p>Humans prioritize close, positive relationships during aging, and socioemotional selectivity theory proposes that this shift causally depend on capacities for thinking about personal future time horizons. To examine this theory, we tested for key elements of human social aging in longitudinal data on wild chimpanzees. Aging male chimpanzees have more mutual friendships characterized by high, equitable investment, whereas younger males have more one-sided relationships. Older males are more likely to be alone, but they also socialize more with important social partners. Further, males show a relative shift from more agonistic interactions to more positive, affiliative interactions over their life span. Our findings indicate that social selectivity can emerge in the absence of complex future-oriented cognition, and they provide an evolutionary context for patterns of social aging in humans.</p>
Social hierarchy reveals thermoregulatory trade-offs in response to repeated stressors
<p>Coping with stressors can require substantial energetic investment, and when resources are limited, such investment can preclude simultaneous expenditure on other biological processes. Among endotherms, energetic demands of thermoregulation can also be immense, yet our understanding of whether a stress response is sufficient to induce changes in thermoregulatory investment is limited. Using the black-capped chickadee as a model species, we tested a hypothesis that stress-induced changes in surface temperature (T<sub>s</sub>), a well-documented phenomenon across vertebrates, stem from trade-offs between thermoregulation and stress responsiveness. Because social subordination is known to constrain access to resources in this species, we predicted that Ts and dry heat loss of social subordinates, but not social dominants, would fall under stress exposure at low ambient temperatures (T<sub>a</sub>), and rise under stress exposure at high T<sub>a</sub>, thus permitting a reduction in total energetic expenditure toward thermoregulation. To test our predictions, we exposed four social groups of chickadees to repeated stressors and control conditions across a Ta gradient (n=30 days/treatment/group), whilst remotely monitoring social interactions and T<sub>s</sub>. Supporting our hypothesis, we show that: (1) social subordinates (n=12), who fed less than social dominants and alone experienced stress-induced mass-loss, displayed significantly larger changes in T<sub>s</sub> following stress exposure than social dominants (n=8), and (2) stress-induced changes in Ts significantly increased heat conservation at low T<sub>a</sub> and heat dissipation at high T<sub>a</sub> among social subordinates alone. These results suggest that chickadees adjust their thermoregulatory strategies during stress exposure when resources are limited by ecologically relevant processes.</p> <p> </p>
A novel method for using RNA-seq data to identify imprinted genes in social Hymenoptera with multiply mated queens
<p>Genomic imprinting results in parent-of-origin dependent gene expression biased towards either the maternally- or paternally-derived allele at the imprinted locus. The kinship theory of genomic imprinting argues that this unusual expression pattern is a manifestation of intra-genomic conflict between the maternally- and paternally-derived halves of the genome that arises because they are not equally related to the genomes of social partners. The theory thus predicts that imprinting may evolve wherever there are close interactions among asymmetrically related kin. The social Hymenoptera with permanent caste differentiation are suitable candidates for testing the kinship theory because haplodiploid sex determination creates strong relatedness asymmetries and nursing workers interact closely with kin. However, progress in the search for imprinted genes in the social Hymenoptera has been slow, in part because tests for imprinting rely on reciprocal crosses that are impossible in most species. Here, we develop a method to systematically search for imprinting in haplodiploid social insects without crosses, using instead samples of pooled individuals collected from natural colonies. We tested this protocol using data available for the leaf-cutting ant <i>Acromyrmex echinatior</i>, providing the first genome-wide search for imprinting in any ant. While we identified several genes as potentially imprinted, none of the four genes tested could be verified as imprinted using digital droplet PCR, highlighting the need for higher quality genomic assemblies that accurately map duplicated genes.</p>
Tracking sickness effects on social encounters via continuous proximity-sensing in wild vampire bats
Sickness behaviors can slow the spread of pathogens across a social network. We conducted a field experiment to investigate how sickness behavior affects individual connectedness over time using a dynamic social network created from high-resolution proximity data. After capturing adult female vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) from a roost, we created 'sick' bats by injecting a random half of bats with the immune-challenging substance, lipopolysaccharide, while the control group received saline injections. Over the next three days, we used proximity sensors to continuously track dyadic associations between 16 'sick' bats and 15 control bats under natural conditions. Compared to control bats, 'sick' bats associated with fewer bats, spent less time near others, and were less socially connected to more well-connected individuals (sick bats had on average a lower degree, strength, and eigenvector centrality). High-resolution proximity data allow researchers to flexibly define network connections (association rates) based on how a particular pathogen is transmitted (e.g., contact duration of >1 vs >60 minutes, contact proximity of <1 vs <10 meters). Therefore, we inspected how different ways of measuring association rates changed the observed effect of LPS. How researchers define association rates influences the magnitude and detectability of sickness effects on network centrality.
Vasoactive intestinal peptide as a mediator of the effects of a supergene on social behavior
<p>Supergenes, or linked groups of alleles that are inherited together, present excellent opportunities to understand gene-behavior relationships. In white-throated sparrows (<i>Zonotrichia albicollis</i>), a supergene on the second chromosome associates with a more aggressive and less parental phenotype. This supergene includes the gene for vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP), a neuropeptide known to play a causal role in both aggression and parental behavior. Here, using a free-living population, we compared levels of VIP mRNA between birds with and without the supergene. We focused on the anterior hypothalamus and infundibular region, two brain regions containing VIP neurons known to play a causal role in aggression and parental behavior, respectively. First, we show that the supergene enhances VIP expression in the anterior hypothalamus and that expression positively predicts vocal aggression independently of genotype in both sexes. Next, we show that the supergene reduces VIP expression in the infundibular region, which suggests reduced secretion of prolactin, a pro-parental hormone. Thus, patterns of VIP expression in these two regions are consistent with the enhanced aggression and reduced parental behavior of birds with the supergene allele. Our results illustrate mechanisms by which elements of genomic architecture, such as supergenes, can contribute to the evolution of alternative behavioral phenotypes.</p>
Interspecific social dominance networks reveal mechanisms promoting coexistence in sympatric charrs in Hokkaido, Japan
<p>1. Coexistence of species requires equalizing mechanisms that minimize fitness differences, which are balanced by stabilizing mechanisms that enhance negative intraspecific interactions versus interspecific ones. Here, we develop a simple theoretical framework that allows measuring the relative strength of intraspecific versus interspecific competition in dominance hierarchies. We use it to evaluate mechanisms promoting coexistence between congeneric charrs that compete for foraging positions, which strongly influence density-dependent growth and survival.</p> <p>2. Agonistic interactions (n = 761) among 71 Dolly Varden Salvelinus malma and whitespotted charr S. leucomaenis were measured by snorkeling in two pools in the sympatric zone of a Hokkaido stream during two summers. Interspecific dominance hierarchies, analyzed using three methods, were closely correlated with fish length but the species treated each other equally. Ranks for the most dominant fish in each pool, determined directly by knockout experiments, were also virtually identical to ranks by length.</p> <p>3. Similarly, exponential random graph modeling of the social networks provided no evidence that either species was dominant over the other. Instead, larger fish were more likely to win contests, especially over fish of the next lower ranks.</p> <p>4. These results demonstrated that the two species were nearly ecological equivalents in accessing key resources in this sympatric zone. Nearly identical growth and stable densities over 4 years further supported this inference, although Dolly Varden were a minority (29% of the assemblage), a sign of some fitness difference.</p> <p>5. Detailed foraging observations coupled with two concurrent studies revealed an effective stabilizing mechanism. Dolly Varden shifted to feeding directly from the benthos when drifting invertebrates declined, a behavior enhanced by morphological character displacement, thereby partitioning food resources and enhancing intraspecific competition while avoiding agonistic encounters with whitespotted charr.</p> <p>6. The plurality of evidence indicates that fitness differences between these ecologically equivalent species are small in this local assemblage, and balanced by resource partitioning, a modest stabilizing mechanism that promotes coexistence. The theoretical framework presented here is a useful tool to evaluate the strength of interspecific versus intraspecific competition, which combined with information on tradeoffs in ecological performance can contribute to a mechanistic understanding of species coexistence. 26-Oct-2020</p>
Social media statistics_v2
<p>These data were collected/ generated through the periodic monitoring of the project’s social media statistics (including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) with a view to measuring and assessing the performance and results of the project’s social media activity in terms of dissemination and communication.</p>
Foraging behaviour alters with social environment in a juvenile songbird
Early independence from parents is a critical period where social information acquired vertically may become outdated, or conflict with new information. However, across natural populations it is unclear if newly-independent young persist in using information from parents, or if group-level effects of conformity override previous behaviours. Here we test if wild juvenile hihi (<em>Notiomystis cincta</em>, a New Zealand passerine) retain a foraging behaviour from parents, or if they change in response to the behaviour of peers. We provided feeding stations to parents during chick-rearing to seed alternative access routes, and then tracked their offspring's behaviour. Once independent, juveniles formed mixed-treatment social groups, where they did not retain preferences that we detected when with parents. Instead, juvenile groups converged over time to use one access route per group, and juveniles that moved between groups switched to copy the locally-favoured option. Juvenile hihi did not copy specific individuals, even if they were more familiar with the preceding bird. Our study shows that early social experiences with parents affect initial foraging decisions, but social environments encountered later on can update transmission of arbitrary behaviours. This suggests that conformity may be widespread in animal groups, with potential cultural, ecological, and evolutionary consequences.
Social learning by mate-choice copying increases dispersal and reduces local adaptation
<p class="MsoPlainText">1. In heterogeneous environments, dispersal may be hampered not only by direct costs, but also because immigrants may be locally maladapted. While maladaptation affects both sexes, this cost may be modulated in females if they express mate preferences that are either adaptive or maladaptive in the new local population.</p> <p class="MsoPlainText">2. Dispersal costs under local adaptation may be mitigated if it is possible to switch to expressing traits of locally adapted residents. In a sexual selection context, immigrant females may learn to mate with locally favoured males. Mate-choice copying is a type of social learning, where individuals, usually females, update their mating preferences after observing others mate. If it allows immigrant females to switch from maladapted to locally adapted preferences, their dispersal costs are mitigated as mate choice helps them create locally adapted offspring.</p> <p class="MsoPlainText">3. To study if copying can promote the evolution of dispersal, we created an individual-based model to simulate the coevolution of four traits: copying, dispersal, a trait relevant for local adaptation, and female preference. We contrast two scenarios with copying — either unconditional, or conditional such that only dispersers copy — with a control scenario that lacks any copying.</p> <p class="MsoPlainText">4. We show copying to lead to higher dispersal, especially if copying is conditionally expressed. This leads to an increase in gene flow between patches and, consequently, a decrease in local adaptation and trait-preference correlations.</p> <p class="MsoPlainText">5. While our study is phrased with female preference as the learned trait, one may generally expect social learning to mitigate dispersal costs, with consequent feedback effects on the spatial dynamics of adaptation.</p>
Increased sperm production linked to competition in the maternal social environment
<p>Maternal or early life effects may prepare offspring for similar social conditions to those experienced by their mothers. For males, the ability to achieve mating and fertilisation success is a key social challenge. Competitive conditions may therefore favour increased body size or ejaculate production in male offspring. We tested this experimentally by comparing reproductive traits of adult male bank voles (<i>Myodes glareolus</i>), whose mothers had experienced contrasting encounter regimes with female conspecifics while breeding. We found that daily sperm production rates and epididymis mass were significantly higher when dams had experienced more frequent encounters with female conspecifics. This response to maternal and early life experience was specific to sperm production and storage, with no evidence for effects on male body mass or the size of testes and accessory reproductive glands. Our findings reveal a potentially adaptive effect of maternal and early-life experience on the development of sperm production, which is worthy of wider investigation.</p>
Open Social Scholarship, In Real Terms
<p>4<sup>th</sup> Lecture</p>
Juvenile social experience and practice have a switch-like influence on adult mate preferences in an insect
<p>Social causes of variation in animal communication systems have important evolutionary consequences, including speciation. The relevance of these effects depends on how widespread they are among animals. There is evidence for such effects not only in birds and mammals, but also frogs and some insects and spiders. Here we analyse the social ontogeny of adult mate preferences in an insect, Enchenopa treehoppers. In these communal plant-feeding insects, individuals reared in isolation or in groups differ in their mate preferences, and the group-reared phenotype can be rescued by playbacks to isolation-reared individuals. We ask about the relative role of signalling experience and signalling practice during ontogeny on the development of adult mating preferences in Enchenopa females. Taking advantage of variation in the signal experience and signalling practice of isolation-reared individuals, we find switch-like effects for experience and practice on female mate preference phenotypes, with individuals having some experience and practice as juveniles best rescuing the group-reared preference phenotype. We discuss how understanding the nature and distribution of social-ontogenetic causes of variation in mate preferences and other sexual traits will bring new insights into how within- and between-population variation influences the evolution of communication systems.</p>
Social partners and temperature jointly affect morning foraging activity of small birds in winter
Daily foraging activity of small wintering birds is classically thought to be driven by the need to gather enough energy reserves to survive each night. A separate line of research has shown that sociality is a major driver in winter foraging activities in many species. Here, we use wintering birds as a study system to move towards an integrative understanding of the influence of energy requirements and sociality on foraging ecology. We used RFID-enabled feeders in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA in January-March 2019 to measure foraging activity in two species (downy woodpecker, <i>Picoides pubescens</i>, and white-breasted nuthatches, <i>Sitta carolinensis</i>). We analyzed the relationship between overnight temperature and morning foraging activity and found that lowest overnight temperature was negatively correlated with morning visitation at feeders. We then used a network approach to ask if flock associations explain similarity in birds' foraging activity. In both species, individuals with stronger associations in a social network were more likely to share similar feeder activity, and an index of social partners' activity explained foraging activity better than overnight temperature. This brings forth new questions about the interplay between individual response to temperature and social factors in shaping how small animals cope with harsh winter conditions.
Social groups with diverse personalities mitigate physiological stress in a songbird
<p>Social groups often consist of diverse phenotypes, including personality types, and this diversity is known to affect the functioning of the group as a whole. Social selection theory proposes that group composition (i.e. social environment) also influences the performance of individual group members. However, the effect of group behavioural composition on group members remains largely unexplored, and it is still contentious whether individuals benefit more in a social environment with homogeneous or diverse behavioural composition. We experimentally formed groups of house sparrows <i>Passer domesticus</i> with high and low diversity of personality (exploratory behaviour), and found that their physiological state (body condition, physiological stress and oxidative damage) improved with increasing group-level diversity of personality. These findings demonstrate that group personality composition affects the condition of group members and individuals benefit from social heterosis (i.e. associating with a diverse set of behavioural types). This aspect of social life can play a key role in affiliation rules of social animals and might explain the evolutionary coexistence of different personalities in nature.</p>
ScienceDex guides
Understand access before you commit
These curated guides explain access requirements, typical timelines, costs, and reuse considerations for widely used research datasets.
Allen Brain Atlas
Allen Brain Atlas is an Allen Institute collection of brain map atlases, datasets, APIs, and analysis tools covering mouse, human, and non-human primate brain resources.
Annotated Behaviour and Observability Dataset (ABODe)
ABODe is a University of Edinburgh DataShare dataset for behavior classification in group-housed mice using home-cage video, identities, bounding boxes, ground-plate positions, and annotator labels.
DANDI Archive for NWB datasets
DANDI is a BRAIN Initiative archive for publishing and sharing neurophysiology data, including electrophysiology, optophysiology, and behavioral data packaged as NWB and related standards.
International Brain Laboratory public data
The International Brain Laboratory public data releases expose standardized mouse decision-making experiments, including Neuropixels recordings, widefield calcium imaging, behavior, and session metadata accessed through the ONE API.
OpenNeuro
OpenNeuro is a free, open platform for sharing neuroimaging datasets, with public search, dataset pages, and download paths for web, S3, DataLad, and the OpenNeuro CLI.