Social tethers: density-dependent social tethers inhibit fitness

2025 · doi:10.32942/x2692b
preprint OA: closed
🔓 Open OA copy Full text JSON View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-07, 2026-07-06 · read from full text ⓘ

The paper develops an agent-based model to test whether social behavior can explain undermatching relative to the ideal free distribution, across varying densities and levels of competition. It finds that low density combined with high sociality best accounts for undermatching, driven by “social tethering,” in which conspecific attraction restricts individuals’ ability to move away from poorer patches. The authors report that in small populations this mechanism can inhibit population growth or recovery. This paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

Putative mechanisms affecting fitness that underlie why animals occupy a particular place are often in tension. A tension amplified in social animals, where individuals are often not free to make independent habitat selection or foraging decisions. The ideal free distribution (IFD) is a density-dependent emergent property describing how individuals should distribute themselves to maximize fitness on the landscape. However, IFD is agnostic to an individual’s propensity to be social, which is known to influence their habitat selection. Our agent-based model tested whether social behaviour explains undermatching, a distribution pattern where more individuals are found within poorer patches than predicted, under varying densities and competition. Low density and high sociality best explained undermatching. We reveal that in social animals, undermatching is driven by social tethering, which restricts an individual’s ability to escape undermatching due to conspecific attraction. Social tethering in small populations has the potential to inhibit population growth – or recovery.
Full text 1,631 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed.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 This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed.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. Putative mechanisms affecting fitness that underlie why animals occupy a particular place are often in tension. A tension amplified in social animals, where individuals are often not free to make independent habitat selection or foraging decisions. The ideal free distribution (IFD) is a density-dependent emergent property describing how individuals should distribute themselves to maximize fitness on the landscape. However, IFD is agnostic to an individual’s propensity to be social, which is known to influence their habitat selection. Our agent-based model tested whether social behaviour explains undermatching, a distribution pattern where more individuals are found within poorer patches than predicted, under varying densities and competition. Low density and high sociality best explained undermatching. We reveal that in social animals, undermatching is driven by social tethering, which restricts an individual’s ability to escape undermatching due to conspecific attraction. Social tethering in small populations has the potential to inhibit population growth – or recovery. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2692B Life Sciences Published: 2025-03-24 08:08 Last Updated: 2025-03-24 08:08 Language: English

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00
unpaywall
last seen: 2026-06-13T06:42:57.164913+00:00