Supplementary material from "Spatial-social familiarity complements the spatial-social interface: evidence from Yellowstone bison" ...

• Main Authors: Merkle, Jerod A, Poulin, Marie-Pier, Caldwell, Molly, Laforge, Michel, Scholle, Anne, Verzuh, Tana, Geremia, Chris
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: The Royal Society 2024
• Subjects: Animal behaviour; Bison bison bison; Plains Bison
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.7423807.v1; https://rs.figshare.com/collections/Supplementary_material_from_Spatial-social_familiarity_complements_the_spatial-social_interface_evidence_from_Yellowstone_bison_/7423807/1

Social animals make behavioural decisions based on local habitat and conspecifics, as well as memorised past experience (i.e., ‘familiarity’) with habitat and conspecifics. Here, we develop a conceptual and empirical understanding of how spatial and social familiarity fit within the spatial-social interface – a novel framework integrating the spatial and social components of animal behaviour. We conducted a multi-scale analysis of the movements of GPS-collared plains bison (Bison bison, n = 66) residing in and around Yellowstone National Park, USA. We found that both spatial and social familiarity mediate how individuals respond to their spatial and social environments. For instance, individuals with high spatial familiarity rely on their own knowledge as opposed to their conspecifics’, and individuals with high social familiarity rely more strongly on the movement of conspecifics to guide their own movement. We also found that fine-scale spatial and social phenotypes often scale up to broad-scale ...