CAREER: The effects of power, support, and information on animal social dynamics

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Social species can benefit in many ways from living in social groups, but these groups are also dynamic and change over time, which requires individuals to navigate a constantly changing social environment. The direction and magnitude of social changes can be difficult to predict but are important to understand because they can strongly affect each animal’s health, reproductive success, and survival as well as group-level social predictability and resilience. This project focuses on testing how aggression and power, affiliation and social support, and social connectedness and information may individually (or in combination) affect the social dynamics of groups, using the socially and cognitively complex monk parakeet as the study species. The study capitalizes on captive parakeet colonies to take an experimental approach that involves detailed behavior data collection. The project carries themes of social networks, behavioral interactions, and cutting-edge analytical approaches over to the educational side by developing a new educational tool to improve data science education and workforce development for biology students as well as providing structured mentoring opportunities for recently-graduated students as a pathway to graduate school and networked peer mentoring opportunities for graduate students.Understanding how power, support, and information interact within dynamic social system is crucial to predicting how these systems evolve, collapse, and thrive in group-living species as well as the connections between sociality and cognition. The proposed work aims to fill gaps in the current state of knowledge of animal sociality by systematically manipulating power, support, and information in groups of captive monk parakeets. This research tests the central hypothesis that power, support, and information are essential factors in explaining social dynamics in socially and cognitively complex species. In Aim 1, a 2x2 experimental design will be used to manipulate support and information in captive parakeet groups to test for independent and combined effects of support and information on power dynamics. In Aim 2, information will be manipulated using experimental group fission-fusions to evaluate how birds react to a lack of information with information-gathering behaviors. In Aim 3, agent-based models will be used to test how variation in cognitive skills and information use affects power dynamics, social resiliency, and recovery speed more generally across species. In the Educational Plan, this research on animal sociality will be integrated with education using the “Sociality Game”, an online multiplayer game which uses engaging questions about animal sociality to teach students quantitative analyses, the fundamentals of data science, and R coding skills.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.