Baigger A, Perony N, Reuter M, Leinert V, Melber M, Grünberger S, Fleischmann D, Kerth G
Transfusion Medicine, Hannover Medical School, Feodor-Lynen-Straße 21, 30625 Hannover, Germany.
Naturwissenschaften. 2013 Sep;100(9):895-8. doi: 10.1007/s00114-013-1090-x. Epub 2013 Aug 16.
Several social mammals, including elephants and some primates, whales and bats, live in multilevel societies that form temporary subgroups. Despite these fission-fusion dynamics, group members often maintain long-term bonds. However, it is unclear whether such individual links and the resulting stable social subunits continue to exist after a complete reorganisation of a society, e.g. following a population crash. Here, we employed a weighted network analysis on 7,109 individual roosting records collected over 4 years in a wild Bechstein's bat colony. We show that, in response to a strong population decline, the colony's two stable social subunits fused into a non-modular social network. Nevertheless, in the first year after the crash, long-term bonds were still detectable, suggesting that the bats remembered previous individual relationships. Our findings are important for understanding the flexibility of animal societies in the face of dramatic changes and for the conservation of social mammals with declining populations.
包括大象、一些灵长类动物、鲸鱼和蝙蝠在内的几种群居性哺乳动物生活在形成临时亚群的多层次社会中。尽管存在这些裂变-融合动态，但群体成员通常会维持长期的联系。然而，尚不清楚在社会完全重组后，例如在种群数量暴跌之后，这种个体联系以及由此产生的稳定社会亚单位是否仍然存在。在此，我们对在一个野生贝希斯坦蝙蝠群落中4年收集的7109条个体栖息记录进行了加权网络分析。我们发现，面对强烈的种群数量下降，该群落的两个稳定社会亚单位融合成了一个非模块化的社会网络。然而，在数量暴跌后的第一年，仍可检测到长期联系，这表明蝙蝠记住了以前的个体关系。我们的研究结果对于理解动物社会在面对巨大变化时的灵活性以及保护种群数量下降的群居性哺乳动物具有重要意义。
