My head feels awash in neurogenesis -- surely five days at the Animal Behavior Society's conference in Boulder has initiated new brains cells!
I attended a good behavior and conservation workshop, attempting to find solutions to four real world, sticky problems. It reminded me why my own research feels a great refuge from such messes. Yet basic research, and perhaps especially understanding animals in their own world, could save us from so many calamities before they begin. But that's another day.
The origins of social behavior are not in cooperation (provisioning young, dueting, chasing away predators) but, more likely, simple tolerance. Not a a gaggle of geese but an aggregation of iguanas. The members of the aggregation are connected to each other, perhaps in 'neighborhoods' -- each member knows a subset of the entire group, just like a group of people who are Facebook friends. (I'm the big red dot in the middle and you can easily see neighborhoods.)
Social networks suggest interesting questions related to personality, behavioral syndromes, learning, parasite load, and fitness (meaning who produces the most offspring who produce the most offspring).
For example, if an animal is bold toward potential predators, does the animal also have many connections to other animals in its group, and does that predict who the animals learns from and its parasite load? Does a young female iguana learn the best nesting site from the most connected iguana in her 'hood? Are the neighborhoods assemblages of related animals? Or are neighborhoods avoiding inbreeding and making sure the mix of animals are unrelated? An how do those layers operate to produce better or poorer fitness?
While the iguana may look like it has no preferences, no likes or dislikes (let's not forget iguanas do not have facial muscles so their lack of 'smiling' isn't terribly revealing), for all we know the aggregation is a powerful kin or even fictive family.
The chessboard base is the social network: individually known iguanas, their attributes, and their connections. And then there will be a relatedness dimension. And personality. And so on...let the sunshine in!
