Article,
The emergent properties of a dolphin social network
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 270 (S2): S186--S188 (November 2003)
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2003.0057
Abstract
Many complex networks, including human societies,
the Internet, the World Wide Web and power grids,
have surprising properties that allow vertices
(individuals, nodes, Web pages, etc.) to be in close
contact and information to be transferred quickly
between them. Nothing is known of the emerging
properties of animal societies, but it would be
expected that similar trends would emerge from the
topology of animal social networks. Despite its small
size (64 individuals), the Doubtful Sound com-
munity of bottlenose dolphins has the same charac-
teristics. The connectivity of individuals follows a
complex distribution that has a scale-free power-law
distribution for large
k
. In addition, the ability for
two individuals to be in contact is unaffected by the
random removal of individuals. The removal of indi-
viduals with many links to others does affect the
length of the ‘information’ path between two indi-
viduals, but, unlike other scale-free networks, it does
not fragment the cohesion of the social network.
These self-organizing phenomena allow the network
to remain united, even in the case of catastrophic
death events.
