Making Friends of Friends Benefits Hyenas
A team of researchers at University of Pennsylvania studied the social interactions of spotted hyenas over two decades in order to better understand the social dynamics within a non-human species. For some background, hyenas move around in groups called clans, which can vary in size, but usually up to one hundred individuals. They discovered that hyenas tend to prefer triadic closures over other bonding aspects such as clan, social rank, or environment. What they mean by this is that hyenas prefer to bond with friends of their friends, almost in a cluster-like nature, than with every hyena in their clan. Like what we learned in class about how online social networks, like Facebook, make friend suggestions, hyenas similarly weigh their social network by the strength of their existing ties. Humans also inadvertently weigh the strength of their ties and it is interesting to juxtapose the social dynamics of this animal species to our own.
The article also mentions that gender plays a role in the social dynamics of hyenas. For example, male hyenas stay to a structured set of rules when forming new friends, while females do not. They explained that this is due to the migration nature of the species, where females tend to stay with a clan while males can often find new clans after puberty. This can be linked to the stability of their new social network. Since females tend to stay within one clan their whole lives, they are able to better understand the existing social network and therefore are able to make balanced networks easily. In contrast, males, as they enter a new clan, have no idea of the pre-existing social network and are more susceptible to unbalanced networks.
The hyena social network has many parallels to the human network and by better understanding the structure of other animal species, it can often offer insight into our own. While hyenas may value the need for triadic closure more than humans, we can study them as an extreme example to see how different social factors can affect the dynamics and stability of a network.
Source: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/making-friends-friends-benefits-hyenas-penn-biologist-finds