Social uncertainty influences the optimal balance of quantity and quality of cooperative relationships

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Many group-living animals develop and maintain stable affiliative social relationships. These ‘social bonds’ can benefit survival and reproduction, but they require significant investments of time and energy. How should individuals allocate those investments towards building new relationships (“diversifying”) versus maintaining existing ones (“focusing”)? The ‘social bet-hedging’ hypothesis states that conditions of greater social certainty (more reliable partner availability) favour greater “focusing”, whereas conditions of social uncertainty favour “diversifying”. This hypothesis is consistent with empirical findings in vampire bats, yet support from agent-based models is mixed. Here, we used an agent-based model to test the relative reproductive success of different “social-networking strategies” in vampire bats under conditions of greater or lower social uncertainty. To manipulate social uncertainty, we minimized or maximized roost-switching rates across simulations with realistic patterns of foraging, social behaviour, ageing, reproduction, and death. Virtual bats inherited one of six social-networking strategies, which varied in allocation of allogrooming across partners, from more focusing to more diversifying. We show that, under a range of conditions, greater social uncertainty favours diversifying strategies that invest relatively more in relationship quantity. Balancing the benefits of focusing and diversifying attention across social partners may be an important yet underappreciated factor explaining social network structure. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2693Q Life Sciences Cooperation, social behaviour, Social Relationships, vampire bats Published: 2025-09-07 16:12 Last Updated: 2025-09-07 16:12 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Data and Code Availability Statement: NetLogo and R scripts and supporting data can be found at https://github.com/anonymousscientist8/social-bet-hedging (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17058021) with an additional large dataset used to determine average roost capacity is found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15633664. Language: English