The emergent properties of a dolphin social network

By David Lusseau. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 2003

870 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many complex networks, including human societies, the Internet, the World Wide Web and power grids, have surprising properties that allow vertices (individuals, nodes, Web pages, etc.) to be in close contact and information to be transferred quickly between them. Nothing is known of the emerging properties of animal societies, but it would be expected that similar trends would emerge from the topology of animal social networks. Despite its small size (64 individuals), the Doubtful Sound community of bottlenose dolphins has the same characteristics. The connectivity of individuals follows a complex distribution that has a scale-free power-law distribution for large k. In addition, the ability for two individuals to be in contact is unaffected by the random removal of individuals. The removal of individuals with many links to others does affect the length of the 'information' path between two individuals, but, unlike other scale-free networks, it does not fragment the cohesion of the social network. These self-organizing phenomena allow the network to remain united, even in the case of catastrophic death events.

Subfields: Ecology, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f2a85e105fc02492d3755924d40217d70bf9268

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Citations in the corpus

Early social development in wild bottlenose dolphins: sex differences, individual variation and maternal influence (2008, background): “Despite the attention that has been given to the complex nature of fissionefusion society in bottlenose dolphins (e.g. Connor et al. 1998, 2000, 2001; Lusseau 2003; Wells 2003; Lusseau & Newman 2004), the role of early experience in social development has not been explored.”
Sociality: The Behaviour of Group-Living Animals (2016, background): “Fission -fusion dynamics have been studied and reported primarily in vertebrate species, particularly mammals, including cetaceans (Lusseau 2003 ), carnivores (Schaller 1972 ; Wolf et al. 2007 ), bats (Popa-Lisseanu et al. 2008 ), ungulates (Aycrigg and Porter 1997 ; Cross et al. 2005 ), elephants…”
Animal social networks: an introduction (2009, methodology): “This approach has plenty of mileage left in it. Early network examples include the work of Lusseau (2003) on dolphins and Croft et al. (2004 )o n guppies, Poecilia reticulata.”
Multilevel social organization and space use in reticulated giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) (2014, background): “2010), elephants (Moss 1988; Weittemyer et al. 2005; Archie et al. 2006b), and marine mammals (Lusseau 2003; Pearson 2009).”
Sex and social networking: the influence of male presence on social structure of female shark groups (2010, background): “2009), there is a distinct paucity of literature associated with social behavior in this taxa with detailed marine research restricted to the fission/fusion populations of sociable marine mammals (Clapham 1996; Connor et al. 1998; Lusseau 2003).”
Sampling animal association networks with the gambit of the group (2009, neutral): “A network approach is often applied as a descriptive tool to help understand the social structure of a population (e.g., dolphins, Lusseau 2003; fish, Croft et al. 2004; African buffalos, Cross et al. 2004; and sea lions, Wolf et al. 2007).”
Structure and resilience of the social network in an insect colony as a function of colony size (2009, background): “Network resilience has generally been associated with a heterogeneous, scale-free connectivity structure where the loss of a few random individuals has little effect (Albert et al. 2000; Dunne et al. 2002b; Fewell 2003; Lusseau 2003).”
Finding and evaluating community structure in networks. (2003, methodology): “The network was compiled by Lusseau @38# from seven years of field studies of the dolphins, with ties between dolphin pairs being established by observation of statistically significant frequent association.”
Community detection in graphs (2009, methodology): “The results of this technique appear good as compared to other spectral methods on artificial graphs generated with the planted `-partition model (Condon and Karp, 2001), as well as on Zachary’s karate club (Zachary, 1977), Lusseau’s dolphins’ network (Lusseau, 2003) and a network of protein-protein”
GA-Net: A Genetic Algorithm for Community Detection in Social Networks (2008, background): “The last example is the social network of 62 bottlenose dolphins living in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand, compiled by Lusseau [ 12 ] from seven years of dolphins behavior.”
Constructing, conducting and interpreting animal social network analysis (2015, methodology): “those in dolphins (Lusseau 2003) and guppies (Croft, Krause & James 2004), were largely descriptive.”
Social preferences of juvenile lemon sharks, Negaprion brevirostris (2009, background): “Although widely recognized in many shark species (Heupel & Simpfendorfer 2005; Hight & Lowe 2008), grouping behaviour has yet to receive the attention that it has been given in other taxa such as cetaceans (Lusseau 2003), primates (Strier et al.”
A comparative network analysis of social style in macaques (2011, result): “Previous studies (Lusseau 2003; Flack et al. 2006; Croft et al. 2008; Whitehead 2008) indicated that patterns of network density, modularity and centrality are indices of group stability.”
Community Structure in Graphs (2007, methodology): “Two other networks have frequently been used to test community detection algorithms: the network of American college football teams derived by Girvan and Newman [14] and the social network of bottlenose dolphins constructed by Lusseau [96].”