The Ecology of Ageing In Wild Societies: Linking Age Structure and Social Behaviour

I have published a second paper which forms the introductory chapter in my PhD thesis. This review paper also formed part of a Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society special issue on Understanding age and society using natural populations. I also gave a talk on this work at the Royal Society in London as part of a meeting associated with the special issue. The video of this talk can be found here.

The paper explores the idea that ageing matters not only because an individual's behaviour and reproductive success change as it gets older, but because the age structure of an entire population may influence how its society functions. Animals of different ages can behave differently, occupy different social positions and interact with others in different ways. As a result, a population dominated by young individuals may have a very different social organisation from one containing a greater mixture of ages.
We reviewed evidence from wild animal populations linking age to social behaviour, and considered how individual-level changes in sociality might scale up to affect patterns at the population level. In particular, we highlight how social network approaches, combined with the long-term demographic datasets available for many natural populations, offer a way to connect individual social ageing with changes in population age structure and ultimately with the functioning of animal societies.
More broadly, the review considers how environmental change can alter these relationships. Human activities can dramatically reshape the demography of wild populations (for example by disproportionately affecting particular age classes) and these demographic changes may have knock-on consequences for social organisation, information transfer and other social processes. Understanding these links therefore provides another way of thinking about both the ecological consequences of changing animal populations and the wider phenomenon of societal ageing. The paper can be found here.