Strong Triadic Closure in Spotted Hyena Behavioral Patterns
http://tntoday.utk.edu/2015/05/15/nimbios-study-friends-friendsjust-spotted-hyena/
This article discusses how the spotted hyena exhibits behavioral patterns of bonding within clusters, much like humans. UT’s National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis conducted the study, which looks at the social network structure of the spotted hyenas. The hyenas seemed to instinctively know the benefits of social bonds with friends of their friends. Hyenas are socially sophisticated and can discriminate kin from unrelated hyenas as well as being selective in their social choices. The study was one of the largest studies of social network dynamics of any non-human species, with more than 55,000 observations of social interactions collected over a twenty-year period in Kenya. The hyenas also follow a complex set of rules when making social decisions such as the fact that males follow rigid rules in forming bonds, while females tend to change their preferences over time. They also make their social decisions based on a variety of different factors such as, social rank, rainfall amounts, and abundance of prey.
Above all, the most important factor in how the hyena’s made social decisions was the creation of triads in their social circles. This exhibits the principle of Strong Triadic Closure as we have discussed frequently in class. The hyenas much like users of Facebook tend to become friends of their friends, resulting in the closure of “triads” of friendship. This finding makes me wonder how many other species exhibit similar behavior. I think there are certainly parallels between these hyenas and other pack animals. Most animals that live/travel in packs are enemies of other packs, resulting in the two cluster structure we have seen in class. The animals achieve structural balance through two separate clusters of nodes between which there are only negative ties, which explains their inclination to dislike an animal from a different pack. This behavior, and Strong Triadic Closure, may also explain how animals are ostracized from packs if they fight with one of its members. A negative relation amongst other positive relations is not a structurally balanced network. This may be why animals will shove an animal out of pack if they do not get along with another member of the pack. Their relationships each slowly deteriorate because of the instability of a triangle with two positive edges and one negative edge. Animals are very interesting to study to examine these types of principles because, at least to our knowledge, they usually have simpler social interactions and probably do not have as many “fake friends” as humans do. As a result of this, they are more likely to closely resemble the examples of network theory and prove it truly does hold true.