Social networks in a rapidly changing world: How do individual and environmental variation shape sociality, the spread of information, and population resilience?

Informations

Funding country

Netherlands

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2020

End date

-

Budget

250,000 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Collective behaviour is widespread among animals, and through social learning provides individuals with ways to deal with rapid environmental change. Within collectives, animals differ in personality and are engaged in networks of social interactions. The availability and spread of information in social networks may depend on the distribution of personalities, but how personality and environmental variation interact to affect collective behaviour is largely unknown, especially in the wild. Animals need to find resources that are often patchily distributed across the landscape. Individuals with an exploratory personality may be more likely to discover resource patches. When confronted with environmental change, a few exploratory individuals could proof crucial for entire populations to find alternative resource patches. Exploratory individuals may also have many social interactions that contribute to information transfer within populations. Mediated by the number of individuals that can be sustained, the distribution of resources may also have considerable consequences for social interactions and the structure of networks. My aim is to determine how personalities and resource distributions affect social learning in networks of free-living individuals, and how they affect population resilience to environmental change. By combining experiments, state-of-the-art tracking technology, unique large-scale resource sampling, and individual-based modelling, I will determine whether: 1) exploratory individuals provide social information on the location of resources, 2) the distribution of exploratory personalities affects social network structure and information transfer, 3) resource distributions affect social networks, and 4) population resilience is determined by personality, resource distributions, and social networks. This project will advance our limited understanding of how particular personalities can have disproportionate effects on collective behaviour, social networks and information transfer in wild populations, and how the distribution of personalities and resources affect population resilience to environmental change. Understanding the mechanisms underlying population resilience might help finding measures to mitigate effects of rapid environmental change.