Social decision-making, communication, and movement

Spotted hyenas, like humans and a small number of other species, live in fission–fusion societies in which group members associate in subgroups that change composition throughout the day. This flexibility allows individuals to modulate their social and spatial environment, adjusting the costs and benefits of group living on short timescales. It also imposes a continual demand for decisions: where to travel, with whom to associate, and when and what to signal.

Social structure accumulates from these decisions, but the heuristics underlying them remain poorly characterized. To deliver a process-based understanding of social influences on animal ecology and evolution, we are decomposing established patterns in social structure (e.g., higher ranked individuals are more gregarious) into the moment-to-moment movement and communication decisions made by the animals in real time.