Foraging dynamics are associated with social status and context in mouse social hierarchies
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Zoology
- Keywords
- social dominance, social hierarchy, eating, drinking, social status, mouse social hierarchies, circadian rhythm, association index, HWIG
- Copyright
- © 2018 Lee et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Foraging dynamics are associated with social status and context in mouse social hierarchies. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26948v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26948v1
Abstract
Living in social hierarchies requires individuals to adapt their behavior and physiology. We have previously shown that male mice living in groups of 12 form linear and stable hierarchies with alpha males producing the highest daily level of major urinary proteins and urine. These findings suggest that maintaining alpha status in a social group requires higher food and water intake to generate energetic resources and produce more urine. To investigate whether social status affects eating and drinking behaviors, we measured the frequency of these behaviors in each individual mouse living in a social hierarchy with non-stop video recording for 24 hours following the initiation of group housing and after social ranks were stabilized. We show alpha males eat and drink most frequently among all individuals in the hierarchy and had reduced quiescence of foraging both at the start of social housing and after hierarchies were established. Subdominants displayed a similar pattern of behavior following hierarchy formation relative to subordinates. The association strength of foraging behavior was negatively associated with that of agonistic behavior corrected for gregariousness (HWIG), suggesting animals modify foraging behavior to avoid others they engaged with aggressively. Overall, this study provides evidence that animals with different social status adapt their eating and drinking behaviors according to their physiological needs and current social environment.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Supplemental figures
Supplemental figures S1-S5