Long-term tracking of social structure in groups of rats
Scientific Reports volume 14, Article number: 22857 (2024 ) Cite this article
Rodents serve as an important model for examining both individual and collective behavior. Dominance within rodent social structures can determine access to critical resources, such as food and mating opportunities. Yet, many aspects of the intricate interplay between individual behaviors and the resulting group social hierarchy, especially its evolution over time, remain unexplored. In this study, we utilized an automated tracking system that continuously monitored groups of male rats for over 250 days to enable an in-depth analysis of individual behavior and the overarching group dynamic. We describe the evolution of social structures within a group and additionally investigate how past behaviors influence the emergence of new social hierarchies when group composition and experimental area changes. Notably, we find that conventional individual and pairwise tests exhibit a weak correlation with group behavior, highlighting their limited accuracy in predicting behavioral outcomes in a collective context. These results emphasize the context-dependence of social behavior as an emergent property of interactions within a group and highlight the need to measure and quantify social behavior in more naturalistic environments.
Collective behavior emerges based on interactions between individuals in a group. This is observed at many different scales, from wound healing at the cellular level1, to task allocation in social insects2, group search behavior3, and information exchange on human social networks4. Hierarchical structures are common in animal groups, for example, in the grooming relationships of chimpanzees5, leadership and movement of pigeons6, and reproduction in cichlid fish7. Social network structure influences decision-making8,9, and dominance position within a network can influence an individual’s fitness10.
