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Elevated aggression is associated with uncertainty in a network of dog dominance interactions
- Source :
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- The Royal Society, 2019.
-
Abstract
- Dominance hierarchies are widespread in animal societies and reduce the costs of within-group conflict over resources and reproduction. Variation in stability across a social hierarchy may result in asymmetries in the benefits obtained from hierarchy formation. However, variation in the stability and behavioural costs of dominance interactions with rank remain poorly understood. Previous theoretical models have predicted that the intensity of dominance interactions and aggression should increase with rank, but these models typically assume high reproductive skew, and so their generality remains untested. Here we show in a pack of free-living dogs with a sex–age-graded hierarchy that the central region of the hierarchy was dominated by more unstable social relationships and associated with elevated aggression. Our results reveal unavoidable costs of ascending a dominance hierarchy, run contrary to theoretical predictions for the relationship between aggression and social rank in high-skew societies, and widen our understanding of how heterogeneous benefits of hierarchy formation arise in animal societies.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
dominance hierarchy
Male
Theoretical models
social stability
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Sexual Behavior, Animal
Dogs
Sex Factors
Exponential random graph models
medicine
Animals
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Behaviour
050102 behavioral science & comparative psychology
exponential random graph model
Social Behavior
General Environmental Science
Generality
agonistic interaction
General Immunology and Microbiology
Behavior, Animal
Aggression
05 social sciences
Age Factors
General Medicine
Dominance hierarchy
Dominance (ethology)
Italy
Social Dominance
Food
Social relationship
Social hierarchy
social network
Female
medicine.symptom
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Psychology
Cognitive psychology
Research Article
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 14712954 and 09628452
- Volume :
- 286
- Issue :
- 1906
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....87af7f8469bb2dd9ad1c7f7bdf745791