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Long-term tracking of social structure in groups of rats
Rodents serve as an important model for examining both individual and collective behavior. Dominance within rodent social structures can determine access to critical resources, such as food and mating opportunities. Yet, many aspects of the intricate interplay between individual behaviors and the resulting group social hierarchy, especially its evolution over time, remain unexplored. In this study, we utilized an automated tracking system that continuously monitored groups of male rats for over 250 days to enable an in-depth analysis of individual behavior and the overarching group dynamic. We describe the evolution of social structures within a group and additionally investigate how past behaviors influence the emergence of new social hierarchies when group composition and experimental area changes. Notably, we find that conventional individual and pairwise tests exhibit a weak correlation with group behavior, highlighting their limited accuracy in predicting behavioral outcomes in a collective context. These results emphasize the context-dependence of social behavior as an emergent property of interactions within a group and highlight the need to measure and quantify social behavior in more naturalistic environments.
An approach applicable to both lab and field conditions is to tabulate appropriate pairwise interaction information of animals in groups and use this to define measures of an individual’s position in the social hierarchy. Subjects We used 28 Wistar male rats from 2 inbred breeding lines (14 Crl:WI BR and 14 HsdBrlHan:WIST, 7 litters/line, 2 individuals/litter; ordered from Toxi-Coop Zrt, Hungary) in this study. Experimental conditions and monitoring Animals were housed in 4 compartments (sized 100 \(\times\) 125 \(\times\) 100 \(\hbox {cm}\)) with polypropylene covered wooden walls and sawdust changed weekly on a tiled floor (see Fig.
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