Department of Population Health and Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
California National Primate Research Center, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2022 Feb 28;377(1845):20200438. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0438. Epub 2022 Jan 10.
The notion of dominance is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom, wherein some species/groups such relationships are strictly hierarchical and others are not. Modern approaches for measuring dominance have emerged in recent years taking advantage of increased computational power. One such technique, named Percolation and Conductance (Perc), uses both direct and indirect information about the flow of dominance relationships to generate hierarchical rank order that makes no assumptions about the linearity of these relationships. It also provides a new metric, known as 'dominance certainty', which is a complimentary measure to dominance rank that assesses the degree of ambiguity of rank relationships at the individual, dyadic and group levels. In this focused review, we will (i) describe how Perc measures dominance rank while accounting for both nonlinear hierarchical structure as well as sparsity in data-here we also provide a metric of dominance certainty estimated by Perc, which can be used to compliment the information dominance rank supplies; (ii) summarize a series of studies by our research team reflecting the importance of 'dominance certainty' on individual and societal health in large captive rhesus macaque breeding groups; and (iii) provide some concluding remarks and suggestions for future directions for dominance hierarchy research. This article is part of the theme issue 'The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies'.
优势的概念在动物王国中无处不在，其中一些物种/群体的关系是严格的等级制，而另一些则不是。近年来，随着计算能力的提高，出现了一些测量优势的现代方法。一种名为渗透和电导率（Perc）的技术利用了关于优势关系流动的直接和间接信息，生成了不假设这些关系具有线性的层次等级顺序。它还提供了一个名为“优势确定性”的新指标，这是一个与优势等级相关的补充指标，用于评估个体、对偶和群体水平上等级关系的模糊程度。在本次重点综述中，我们将：（i）描述 Perc 如何在考虑非线性层次结构以及数据稀疏性的情况下测量优势等级，在这里我们还提供了 Perc 估计的优势确定性指标，可用于补充优势等级提供的信息；（ii）总结我们研究团队的一系列研究，反映了在大型圈养恒河猴繁殖群体中，“优势确定性”对个体和社会健康的重要性；（iii）提供一些结论性意见和对未来优势等级研究方向的建议。本文是主题为“啄序的百年：优势等级研究的现状和未来前景”的一部分。
