What are the costs and benefits for animals living in groups of different sizes? Balancing the trade-offs between within-group Read More

Many social animals form linear dominance hierarchies, with a clear rank order among group members. Such hierarchies can profoundly influence health and access to resources, but the mechanisms underlying hierarchy formation and maintenance remain unclear. Do individual dominance ranks simply emerge from individual attributes – such as fighting ability? Or are linear hierarchies the product of social self-organization processes such as winner and loser effects – i.e. the phenomenon in which winners become more likely to win in subsequent encounters, and losers become more likely to lose? Here, we present the first evidence for social self-organization processes in a wild animal population.  Read More