Dr. Eli Strauss

AvH Postdoctoral Fellow

Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

👇Watch juvenile spotted hyenas acquire their ranks👇

Figure from my talk at #BehavEcol2018. Props to @Eliz_Hobson for inventing the attribute ordered network (left); great for plotting aggression and dominance (tutorial on her site https://t.co/xEkiVbLfSn) @MSUHyenas #rstats pic.twitter.com/pgMRHSX17d
— Eli Strauss (@_straussed) August 14, 2018

I’m a behavioral ecologist interested in how stable social systems evolve from collectives of individuals with variable experiences and diverse – and often competing – interests. Amazingly, persistent and functional societies have evolved repeatedly despite being made up of individuals who experience divergent costs and benefits of group living, form heterogeneous relationships with their group-mates, and are shaped by different developmental experiences. In my research, I use a combination of field experiments, computational techniques, remote sensing, and long-term observational data to understand the interplay between societies and their constituents across scales – from the mechanics of individual behavioral interactions to the dynamics of social inequality at the group level. A recurring theme in my research is a long-term perspective that explores how these phenomena lead to the emergence of structures that span lifetimes and generations.

> eli
$interests
[1] "within-group conflict"             "early life adversity"            
[3] "collective behavior"               "quantitative methods in behavioral ecology"
[5] "social evolution"                    "cooking"                            

$skills
[1] "R"                       "git"                     "social network analysis"
[4] "statistics"            "simulation techniques"         "banjo"                  

$familiar_with
[1] "python"                     "c++"                       
[3] "SQL"                        "agent-based modeling"      
[5] "high-performance computing"        "running"

Featured Article

Social alliances improve rank and fitness in convention-based societies

What forces produce and maintain social inequality, and why do society members tolerate this inequality? The “One Percent” clearly benefit from having high status, but low-status individuals have strong incentive to challenge the established pecking order and try to improve their position. This conundrum is particularly striking in the societies of many primates and spotted hyenas, where females who are born to low-status mothers rarely manage to improve their position. Here we find that females who are strongly allied with their group-mates are more likely to improve their status, and that upward social mobility is often achieved with support from their closest allies. This suggests that, much like some animals compete physically for status, these species compete through social alliances.

Eli D. Strauss, Kay E. Holekamp

In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

PDF Journal

Recent Publications

For a full list of my publications, see my CV

Brown A, Pioon M, Holekamp KE, Strauss ED (in review). Infanticide by females is a leading source of juvenile mortality in a large social carnivore. The American Naturalist.

Holekamp KE, Strauss ED (2020) Reproduction within a hierarchical society from a female’s perspective. Integrative and Comparative Biology. 60: 753–764. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaa06810.1093/icb/icaa068.

Strauss ED, Shizuka D, Holekamp KE (2020) Juvenile rank acquisition predicts fitness independent of adult rank. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B.

Green DS, Farr M, Holekamp KE, Strauss ED, Zipkin E. (2019) Can hyena behavior predict abundances of sympatric carnivores? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0052

Strauss ED, Holekamp KE. (2019) Social alliances improve rank and fitness in convention-based societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116:8919-8924. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810384116

Strauss ED, Holekamp KE. (2019) Inferring longitudinal hierarchies: Framework and methods for studying the dynamics of dominance. Journal of Animal Ecology, 88:521-536. doi.org/10.¹¹¹¹⁄₁₃₆₅-2656.12951

Smith JE, Lehmann KDS, Montgomery TM, Strauss ED, Holekamp KE. (2017) Insights from long-term field studies of mammalian carnivores. Journal of Mammalogy, 98:631-641. doi:10.1093/jmammal/gyw194.

Holekamp KE, Strauss ED. (2016) Aggression and dominance: An interdisciplinary overview. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 12:44-51. doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2016.08.005

Jones SC, Strauss ED, Holekamp KE. (2015) Ecology of African Carrion. Pp. 459-489 in Carrion Ecology, Evolution, and Their Applications. Benbow ME, Tomberlin JK, Tarone AM (Eds). CRC Press. Boca Raton, FL.