Analyzing Animal Societies

by Whitehead, Hal

• ISBN13: 9780226895239
• ISBN10: 0226895238
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-07-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Animals lead rich social lives. They care for one another, compete for resources, and mate. Within a society, social relationships may be simple or complex and usually vary considerably, both between different groups of individuals and over time. These social systems are fundamental to biological organization, and animal societies are central to studies of behavioral and evolutionary biology. But how do we study animal societies? How do we take observations of animals fighting, grooming, or forming groups and produce a realistic description or model of their societies? Analyzing AnimalSocietiespresents a conceptual framework for analyzing social behavior and demonstrates how to put this framework into practice by collecting suitable data on the interactions and associations of individuals so that relationships can be described, and, from these, models can be derived. In addition to presenting the tools, Hal Whitehead illustrates their applicability using a wide range of real data on a variety of animal speciesfrom bats and chimps to dolphins and birds. The techniques that Whitehead describes will be profitably adopted by scientists working with primates, cetaceans, birds, and ungulates, but the tools can be used to study societies of invertebrates, amphibians, and even humans. Analyzing AnimalSocietieswill become a standard reference for those studying vertebrate social behavior and will give to these studies the kind of quality standard already in use in other areas of the life sciences.

Author Biography

Hal Whitehead is a University Research Professor in the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the author of Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Conventions and Abbreviations

Analyzing Social Structure

Introduction

What Is Social Structure?

Why Social Structure Is Important

Conceptualizing Animal Societies: A Brief History

Ethology and Behavioral Ecology

Hinde’s Ethological Conceptual Framework of Social Structure

Other Definitions and Concepts of Social Structure

Elements and Measures of Social Structure

The Functional Why Questions, and Ecology

Examples of Social Analyses

Problems with Analyzing Social Structure

Technical Matters

Modes of Scientific Enquiry

Basic Descriptive Statistics

Precision of Statistics: Bootstraps and Jackknives

Hypothesis Testing

Data Matrices

Ordination

Classification

Model Fitting and Selection: the Method of Likelihood and the Akaike Information Criterion

Computer Programs

Observing Interactions and Associations: Collecting Data

Types of Behavior

Interactions

Associations

Groups

Identifying Individuals &n

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