In highly social top predators, group living is an ecological strategy that enhances individual
fitness, primarily through increased foraging success. Additive mortality events across …

Identifying how social organization shapes individual behavior, survival, and fecundity of
animals that live in groups can inform conservation efforts and improve forecasts of …

An individual's ecological environment affects their mortality risk, which in turn has
fundamental consequences for life-history evolution. In many species, social relationships …

Individuals play various roles in maintaining social integrity of mammalian populations.
However, many models developed for managing wildlife resources assume that all …

Quantitatively characterizing the social structure of a population provides important insight
into the forces shaping key population processes. Moreover, long-term social dynamics …

For animals that tend to remain with their natal group rather than individually disperse, group
sizes may become too large to benefit individual fitness. In such cases, group splitting (or …

In studies of social behaviour, social bonds are usually inferred from rates of interaction or
association. This approach has revealed many important insights into the proximate …

Non-social factors can influence animal social structure. In killer whales (Orcinus orca), fish-
versus mammal-eating ecological differences are regarded as key ecological drivers of their …

The primary prey of killer whales (Orcinus orca) in the Strait of Gibraltar is the bluefin tuna
(Thunnus thynnus). All killer whales observed in this area hunt tuna by chasing individual …

In cooperative species, human-induced rapid environmental change may threaten cost–
benefit tradeoffs of group behavioral strategies that evolved in past environments. Capacity …