| dc.description.abstract | Intergroup conflict can be a strong force in the lives of social species. Conflict can be dramatic, leading to serious injury or death, loss of territory or dominance status, and can impact behaviour, reproductive success and fitness. The impact of intergroup conflict on within-group behaviour is a growing area of research, and evidence for increased affiliation between group members after exposure to intergroup conflict has been found in several species. However, these studies focus on short timescales, the minutes and hours post-conflict, and it is unclear what effect intergroup conflict has on within-group behaviour in the longer term. In this thesis I use the banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) as a model system to investigate the effects of intergroup conflict on within-group behaviour in the longer term. I discovered that group level within-group affiliation was only affected in the hour after exposure to conflict, but individual social relationships were affected into the longer term, up to two days after exposure. Unlike other studied populations, banded mongooses reduced within-group affiliation and aggression, and these changes differed between males and females, and between younger and older mongooses. I found only tentative evidence that intergroup conflict affected group movement or home range use, however, the risk of intergroup conflict affected leadership, with evidence that females lead more successfully in areas of high risk at the edge of the territory, which may indirectly affect movements in the longer term. This thesis gives evidence that intergroup conflict affects behaviour in the longer term, beginning to bridge the gap between evolutionary theory and empirical observations, and highlights that groups do not respond in a heterogeneous way, as different sex and age classes react differently, potentially due to differential costs and benefits. | en_GB |
