The effects of ecology on social organization

Abstract

One of the main themes in recent ecological studies has been the search for a model to explain sociality in animals. My study on the African buffalo has been propelled by this drive too. A few years ago, researchers interested in the behaviour of animals stressed its genetic basis. It was a time when the behavioural repertoire of a species was considered more or less programmed by the genome. For example, Mayr (1970) thought that behaviour was programmed by relatively few genes as compared with morphological traits since closely related species that (almost by definition) morphologically resembled each other could show a different behavioural repertoire, indicating the relative ease of change; the alternative, as he saw it, was that the same behaviour could be produced by different combinations of genes. This way of thinking resulted in the idea that, if the genetic relatedness of species was known, phylogeny could yield insight in the behaviour and even social organization of a given species on the basis of knowledge of a related species (Tinbergen 1962). This approach was merged with the increasing knowledge of the behaviour and social organization of free-living animals gained through field studies.