Life Sciences Commons^™

Investigating Social Dynamics Using Automated Radiotracking Of Winter Flocks Of Black-Capped Chickadees (Poecile Atricapillus), Christopher J. Course

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The major forces that govern social groups, namely fission-fusion dynamics, cohesion and maintenance, are nearly ubiquitous across animal groups. The field of animal collective behaviour has recently been married with automated radiotracking producing a ‘re-wilding’ of field research into sociality. The combination of this with Social Network Analysis has led to discoveries such as population wide information transfer and the flexibility of animal groups to change social connectivity based on environmental context. However, these networks are constructed, and do not include the dynamic environmental, spatio-temporal, and social contexts which directly affect sociality. I conducted the first automated radiotracking study I …