Inferring dominance interactions from automatically recorded temporal data

Abstract
Understanding dominance hierarchies is an important aspect of many studies of animal groups. Collecting the necessary data requires a large amount of time and effort to detect only a small number of interactions. Here, we assess the viability of extracting interactions from a temporal data stream of arrival and departures to a feeder equipped with a radio‐frequency identifier antenna. We show that the interactions extracted from this type of data can create similar dominance hierarchies to those produced by analysing video data of interactions. Additionally, we assessed the amount of temporal data required to obtain a dominance hierarchy and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of utilising temporal data streams to generate dominance hierarchies of animal groups. The code to extract the dominance interactions and test the correlation between different dominance hierarchies is included in the Supporting Information.

Source: Ethology - January 1, 2018 Category: Zoology Authors: Julian C. Evans, Isabelle Devost, Teri B. Jones, Julie Morand ‐Ferron Tags: RESEARCH PAPER Source Type: research