Understanding the consequences of losing individuals from wild populations is a current and pressing issue, yet how such loss influences the social behaviour of the remaining animals is largely unexplored. Through combining the automated tracking of winter flocks of over 500 wild great tits (Parus major) with removal experiments, we assessed how individuals' social network positions responded to the loss of their social associates. We found that the extent of flockmate loss that individuals experienced correlated positively with subsequent increases in the number of their social associations, the average strength of their bonds and their overall connectedness within the social network (defined as summed edge weights). Increased social connectivity was not driven by general disturbance or changes in foraging behaviour, but by modifications to fine-scale social network connections in response to losing their associates. Therefore, the reduction in social connectedness expected by individual loss may be mitigated by increases in social associations between remaining individuals. Given that these findings demonstrate rapid adjustment of social network associations in response to the loss of previous social ties, future research should examine the generality of the compensatory adjustment of social relations in ways that maintain the structure of social organization.
Raw Data For Firth et al
Raw data and individual summary information for "Wild birds respond to flockmate loss by increasing their social network associations to others" (submitted). Authors: Firth*, Josh, Voelkl, Bernhard, Crates, Ross, Aplin, Lucy, Biro, Dora, Croft, Darren, Sheldon, Ben. *joshua.firth@zoo.ox.ac.uk.
The Data.RData file contains four primary objects:
1) ‘records’ contains the raw primary data for the manuscript. This is the RFID detections of visiting great tits during the study and experiment period. Each row denotes a single second RFID detection of an individual. The columns show information on (i) ’ring’ - the unique ring number of the visiting great tit, (ii) ‘time’ - the timestamp of the detection, (iii) ‘location’ - the unique feeder it was detected on and (iv) ‘week’ - a number denoting the weekend of the detection relevant to the experiment (first removals (i.e. trial 1) performed between weekends 4 and 5).
2) ‘focals’ contains summary information about which treatment category each individual fell into on each experimental weekend. Each row consists of an individual per trial. The columns show information on (i) ‘ring’ - the unique ring number of the visiting great tit, (ii) ‘trial’ - the trial number of that week’s experiment and (iii) ‘category’ which is one of 3 options: ‘fmr’ (for those who had their flockmate removed), ‘fmc’ (for those who had their flock mate captured and then released) and ‘ao’ for all other focal birds (i.e. those who appeared the weekend before and after the replica, but did not have their flock mates removed or captured).
3) ‘info.on.caught.birds’ contains summary information regarding which birds were removed and which were caught then re-released that replica. Each row contains an individual per trial. The columns show information on (i) ‘ring’ - the unique ring number of the visiting great tit, (ii) ‘trial’ - the trial number of that week’s experiment and (iii) ‘treatment’ which is one of 2 options: ‘removed’ (for those individuals which were temporarily removed over the following weekend) and ‘re-released’ (for those individuals which were immediately re-released within 30mins of capture).
4) ‘details’ contains the ReadMe file text instructions
