Elevated aggression is associated with uncertainty in a network of dog dominance interactions
Silk, M; Cant, MA; Cafazzo, S; et al.Natoli, E; McDonald, R
Date: 3 July 2019
Article
Journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Publisher
Royal Society, The
Publisher DOI
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 ...
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.
Biosciences - old structure
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