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%Para 1: Networks Are Being Increasingly Used To Quantify

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%Para 1: Networks are being increasingly used to quantify social structure of wildlife species.
Animal societies are increasingly being recognised as complex, including species that have traditionally been considered as solitary. Over the past 20-30 years, modern technology has enabled researchers to quantify the social structure in animal societies using tools from network analysis. Mathematically, networks describe interactions between a set of nodes by placing edges connecting the nodes. Social network approaches have been used in the literature to document animal interactions in multiple different contexts, including aggressive encounters citep{Casey2015}, affiliative contacts (e.g., grooming, citet{Franz2015}, trophallaxis, …show more content…

However, while previous studies have focused on how the position within a social network affects an individual’s fitness, few have explored the relationship between species sociality and network structure. citet{Faust2002} compared 42 networks across human, animal and bird species and found network similarity to be dependent on the interaction type rather than the taxonomic classification. A follow-up study that compared 51 human and non-human social networks pointed out the difficulties in comparing network structures across taxa, as most of the global network properties are constrained by network size and edge density citep{Faust2006}. Comparative studies of primate social networks have shown an association between neocortex size, which is linked to higher social ability, with network density, connectivity, and global network efficiency citep{Kudo2001, Lehmann2009, Pasquaretta2014}. citet{Lusseau2004} compared the structure of dolphin social networks with known features of human social networks (positive degree homophily, preferential association by age), but no formal statistical comparisons were made. Other recent attempts have been limited to closely related species (e.g., comparison of grevy’s zebra, extit{Equus grevyi} and onager, extit{Equus hemionus} by citet{Sundaresan2007}).

%Para 4: What is assumed in the literature about network

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