While the importance of social networks in shaping behavioural and ecological processes is well-known, the underlying mechanisms that govern network formation and variation in network structure are less understood. In 2016, “social inheritance” was proposed as a general network formation model which assumes that offspring’s social network ties are derived from their mothers’ associates. In recent empirical studies, researchers have found evidence for the inheritance of maternal associates in group-living species such as chacma baboons and spotted hyenas. However, while social inheritance has originally been proposed as a general network formation process, most previous studies have focused on terrestrial, female philopatric species with kin-structured social systems and may therefore not be capturing the diversity of social inheritance processes across animal societies.
In my MSc thesis I aim to explore and quantify whether the process of social inheritance shapes how both female and male offspring’s social networks are formed in the bisexual philopatric Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia. While the presence of social inheritance has already been inferred in this study population, it has not been quantitatively assessed yet. I am also interested not just in whether individual maternal associates are inherited but whether strongly associated mothers have offspring that associate with each other more than expected by chance. Moreover, I will explore potential demographic (offspring sex and age), cultural (sponging/ non-sponging mother) and genetic (genetic relatedness between the mother and her associates) influences on both the inheritance of maternal associates to the offspring as well as the carry-over of association patterns between mothers to between their offspring.
Given the relevance of social bonds for both female and male reproductive success in their fission-fusion society, investigating the presence of social inheritance will provide crucial insights into the extent to which maternal associations shape the offspring’s social network.
