Presentation Details
Social doesn’t describe it: the complexity of group living

Eileen Lacey.

University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Abstract


Social interactions are a fundamental part of the lives of most animals. Even in species in which adults live alone, individuals may engage in a rich suite of interactions associated with territory defense, mating, and parental care. Typically, the tendency to live in groups is viewed as a significant step in the evolution of social complexity, with group living providing the foundation for striking forms of cooperation and conflict not observed in solitary species. Accordingly, considerable research has focused on the causes and consequences of group living. As the number of species under study has grown, so has the diversity of social organizations recognized as group living. Does this wealth of examples help or does more variation make it more challenging to develop general explanations for group living? How different, really, is the behavior of some solitary and group living species? To what extent does group living facilitate other aspects of sociality? Drawing from the literature and from my own studies of burrowing rodents, I will explore our understanding of the wonderful complexity of group living as a central element of animal social behavior.

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