Dynamic networks of fighting and mating in a wild cricket population

Reproductive success is often highly skewed in animal populations. Yet the processes leading to this are not always clear. Similarly, connections in animal social networks are often non-randomly distributed, with some individuals with many connections and others with few, yet whether there are simple explanations for this pattern has not been determined. Numerous social interactions involve dyads embedded within a wider network. As a result, it may be possible to model which individuals accumulate social interaction through a more general understanding of the social network’s structure, and how this structure changes over time. We analysed fighting and mating interactions across the breeding season in a population of wild field crickets under surveillance from a network of video cameras. We fitted stochastic actor-oriented models to determine the dynamic process by which networks of cricket fighting and mating interactions form, and how they co-influence each other. We found crickets tended to fight those in close spatial proximity to them, and those possessing a mutual connection in the fighting network, and heavier crickets fought more often. We also found that crickets who mate with many others tended to fight less in the following time period. This demonstrates that a mixture of spatial constraints, characteristics of individuals and characteristics of the immediate social environment are key for determining social interactions. The mating interaction network required very few parameters to understand its growth and so structure; only homophily by mating success was required to simulate the skew of mating interactions seen in this population. This demonstrates that relatively simple, but dynamic processes can give highly skewed distributions of mating success.