Asking the pikas politely…
Social relationships have important fitness consequences in many taxa. Much of the prior literature on the adaptive value of social relationships has looked for associations between social network position, or social structure, and fitness correlates during a single period of time–often a year. However, individuals often vary in the strength and number of their relationships across their lifetimes. Thus, we asked whether deviations from an individual’s lifetime average social patterns, as measured using a set of social network statistics, were associated with lifetime reproductive success (LRS) and longevity in yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer). We expected that increased social plasticity would be positively associated with both LRS and longevity, as deviations from lifetime average social network traits are associated with increased fitness at the annual scale. We used 20 years of data on social connectedness to fit a double hierarchical generalised linear model, which estimated an individual’s lifetime average of six social network traits and the corresponding variance of each. We then fitted generalised linear models to examine how variation in LRS and longevity may be explained by this variation in social traits. We found no significant association between levels of social plasticity and our fitness correlates except in one case. Overall, our data does not seem to indicate an inherent value to social plasticity.
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