Social Experience of Captive Livingstone’s Fruit Bats (Pteropus livingstonii)

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The maintenance and stability of social experience is an especially important element of the captive welfare of zoo-housed species. The population of critically endangered Livingstone’s fruit bats (Pteropus livingstonii) resident at Jersey Zoo display a complex social structure of affiliative and aggressive interactions. Subgroups defined by individual characteristics contribute in different ways to this structure. Social information, illuminated through the use of social network analysis techniques, could be used in the future to promote social stability and safeguard individual welfare when making evidence-based husbandry decisions. ABSTRACT: Social network analysis has been highlighted as a powerful tool to enhance the evidence-based management of captive-housed species through its ability to quantify the social experience of individuals. We apply this technique to explore the social structure and social roles of 50 Livingstone’s fruit bats (Pteropus livingstonii) housed at Jersey Zoo, Channel Islands, through the observation of associative, affiliative, and aggressive interactions over two data collection periods. We implement binomial mixture modelling and characteristic-based assortment quantification to describe the complexity and organisation of social networks, as well as a multiple regression quadratic assignment procedural (MRQAP) test to analyse the relationship between network types. We examine the effects of individual characteristics (i.e., sex, age, and dominance rank) on social role by fitting models to explain the magnitude of node metrics. Additionally, we utilize a quadratic assignment procedural (QAP) test to assess the temporal stability of social roles over two seasons. Our results indicate that P. livingstonii display a non-random network structure. Observed social networks are positively assorted by age, as well as dominance rank. The frequency of association between individuals correlates with a higher frequency of behavioural interactions, both affiliative and aggressive. Individual social roles remain consistent over ten months. We recommend that, to improve welfare and captive breeding success, relationships between individuals of similar ages and dominance levels should be allowed to persist in this group where possible, and separating individuals that interact frequently in an affiliative context should be avoided.