Eli Strauss

PhD Candidate

Michigan State University

👇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 am a behavioral ecologist interested in the ecology and evolution of complex social systems. In particular, I’m interested in the ecological, behavioral, and systems-level forces that produce social inequality in domains like health, social status, and social connectedness. My current research focus is on developing quantitative approaches to measuring hierarchical social structure and using them to study social inequality in the nepotistic societies of spotted hyenas.

> eli
$interests
[1] "social hierarchies"                  "social network analysis"            
[3] "collective behavior"                 "quantitative methods in behavioral ecology"
[5] "social evolution"                    "cooking"                            

$skills
[1] "R"                       "SQL"                     "social network analysis"
[4] "statistics"              "field data collection"   "banjo"                  

$familiar_with
[1] "python"                     "c++"                       
[3] "git"                        "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

Green DS, Farr M, Holekamp KE, Strauss ED, Zipkin E. (in revision) Can hyena behavior predict abundances of sympatric carnivores? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B.

Strauss ED, Holekamp KE. (2019) Social alliances improve rank and fitness in convention-based societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://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.

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.

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.