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A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group-Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms

Species are often classified in discrete categories, such as solitary, subsocial, social and eusocial based on broad qualitative features of their social systems. Often, however, species fall between categories or species within a category may differ from one another in ways that beg for a quantitat...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Avilés, Leticia, Harwood, Gyan, Koenig, W
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3546379/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23335829
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/eth.12028
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author Avilés, Leticia
Harwood, Gyan
Koenig, W
author_facet Avilés, Leticia
Harwood, Gyan
Koenig, W
author_sort Avilés, Leticia
collection PubMed
description Species are often classified in discrete categories, such as solitary, subsocial, social and eusocial based on broad qualitative features of their social systems. Often, however, species fall between categories or species within a category may differ from one another in ways that beg for a quantitative measure of their sociality level. Here, we propose such a quantitative measure in the form of an index that is based on three fundamental features of a social system: (1) the fraction of the life cycle that individuals remain in their social group, (2) the proportion of nests in a population that contain multiple vs. solitary individuals and (3) the proportion of adult members of a group that do not reproduce, but contribute to communal activities. These are measures that should be quantifiable in most social systems, with the first two reflecting the tendencies of individuals to live in groups as a result of philopatry, grouping tendencies and intraspecific tolerance, and the third potentially reflecting the tendencies of individuals to exhibit reproductive altruism. We argue that this index can serve not only as a way of ranking species along a sociality scale, but also as a means of determining how level of sociality correlates with other aspects of the biology of a group of organisms. We illustrate the calculation of this index for the cooperative social spiders and the African mole-rats and use it to analyse how sex ratios and interfemale spacing correlate with level of sociality in spider species in the genus Anelosimus.
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spelling pubmed-35463792013-01-16 A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group-Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms Avilés, Leticia Harwood, Gyan Koenig, W Ethology Research Papers Species are often classified in discrete categories, such as solitary, subsocial, social and eusocial based on broad qualitative features of their social systems. Often, however, species fall between categories or species within a category may differ from one another in ways that beg for a quantitative measure of their sociality level. Here, we propose such a quantitative measure in the form of an index that is based on three fundamental features of a social system: (1) the fraction of the life cycle that individuals remain in their social group, (2) the proportion of nests in a population that contain multiple vs. solitary individuals and (3) the proportion of adult members of a group that do not reproduce, but contribute to communal activities. These are measures that should be quantifiable in most social systems, with the first two reflecting the tendencies of individuals to live in groups as a result of philopatry, grouping tendencies and intraspecific tolerance, and the third potentially reflecting the tendencies of individuals to exhibit reproductive altruism. We argue that this index can serve not only as a way of ranking species along a sociality scale, but also as a means of determining how level of sociality correlates with other aspects of the biology of a group of organisms. We illustrate the calculation of this index for the cooperative social spiders and the African mole-rats and use it to analyse how sex ratios and interfemale spacing correlate with level of sociality in spider species in the genus Anelosimus. Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2012-12 2012-11-19 /pmc/articles/PMC3546379/ /pubmed/23335829 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/eth.12028 Text en Copyright © 2012 Blackwell Verlag GmbH http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ Re-use of this article is permitted in accordance with the Creative Commons Deed, Attribution 2.5, which does not permit commercial exploitation.
spellingShingle Research Papers
Avilés, Leticia
Harwood, Gyan
Koenig, W
A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group-Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms
title A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group-Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms
title_full A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group-Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms
title_fullStr A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group-Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms
title_full_unstemmed A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group-Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms
title_short A Quantitative Index of Sociality and Its Application to Group-Living Spiders and Other Social Organisms
title_sort quantitative index of sociality and its application to group-living spiders and other social organisms
topic Research Papers
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3546379/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23335829
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/eth.12028
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