eBook

Exploring Animal Social Networks

RICHARD JAMES, JENS KRAUSE, DARREN P. CROFT

2008

Overview

Social network analysis is used widely in the social sciences to study interactions among people, groups, and organizations, yet until now there has been no book that shows behavioral biologists how to apply it to their work on animal populations.Exploring Animal Social Networksprovides a practical guide for researchers, undergraduates, and graduate students in ecology, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and zoology. Existing methods for studying animal social structure focus either on one animal and its interactions or on the average properties of a whole population. This book enables researchers to probe animal social structure at all levels, from the individual to the population. No prior knowledge of network theory is assumed. The authors give a step-by-step introduction to the different procedures and offer ideas for designing studies, collecting data, and interpreting results. They examine some of today's most sophisticated statistical tools for social network analysis and show how they can be used to study social interactions in animals, including cetaceans, ungulates, primates, insects, and fish. Drawing from an array of techniques, the authors explore how network structures influence individual behavior and how this in turn influences, and is influenced by, behavior at the population level. Throughout, the authors use two software packages--UCINET and NETDRAW--to illustrate how these powerful analytical tools can be applied to different animal social organizations.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: Animal behavior / Animal societies / Artificial neural network / Assortative mixing / Behavioral ecology / Behavioural sciences / Betweenness / Biological network / Biological Sciences / Biology / Calculation / Captivity (animal) / Case study / Centrality / Cluster analysis / Combinatorial optimization / Community structure / Complex network / Correspondence analysis / Data collection / Decision-making / Degree distribution / Dendrogram / Disease / Ecology / Ecology & Evolutionary Biology / Embedding / Ethology / Evolution / Food web / Foraging / Inference / Life Sciences / Logistic regression / Mantel test / Mating system / Matrix population models / Modularity (networks) / NATURE / Ecology / Network model / Network motif / Network theory / Null model / P-value / Parasite load / Pheromone / Power law / Predation / Probability / Randomization / Result / Sample Size / Sampling (statistics) / Sampling bias / Sampling error / SCIENCE / SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Zoology / General / SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Biology / Sexual selection / Small-world experiment / Social behavior / Social behavior in animals / Social environment / Social group / Social network / Social network analysis / Social organization / Social relation / Social science / Social structure / Sociality / Sociobiology / Sociogram / Statistic / Statistical hypothesis testing / Test statistic / The Evolution of Cooperation / Toy model / User interface / Zoology
• ISBN: 9780691127521, 0691127522, 0691127514, 9780691127514, 9781400837762, 1400837766