The effects of maternal social connectivity and integration on offspring survival in a marmot

In social species, maternal social relationships, in addition to direct care, impact offspring survival but much of what we know about these effects comes from studies of obligately social and cooperatively breeding species. Yellow-bellied marmots ( Marmota flaviventer ) are a facultatively social species whose social groups vary in composition, size, and cohesiveness. This natural variation in sociality and cooperative breeding behavior makes yellow-bellied marmots an ideal species within which to study the effects of maternal affiliative and agonistic social behavior on offspring. We used social network analysis to investigate the relationship between maternal social connectivity and integration on offspring summer and yearly survival, with the hypothesis that offspring with more affiliative mothers are more likely to survive than the offspring of more agonistic mothers. However, we found the inverse to be true: pups born to mothers who received more affiliative interactions were less likely to survive while the offspring of mothers who were more highly integrated into agonistic networks had enhanced survival. Overall, maternal social network measures were positively and negatively correlated with offspring survival, indicating that pups are influenced by their mother’s social world, often in contradictory ways. Relative predation risk and colony location also mediated the effects of social relationships on pup survival. This study contributes to a small but growing body of work that demonstrates that specific attributes of sociality have specific consequences and that by adopting an attribute-focused view of sociality we are better able to understand how environmental conditions mediate the costs and benefits of sociality. Lay Summary Maternal social relationships can impact offspring survival but much of what we know about these effects comes from studies of obligately social species. In faculatively social yellow-bellied marmots we found that pups born to mothers who received more affiliative interactions were less likely to survive while the offspring of mothers who were more highly integrated into agonistic networks had enhanced survival. Overall, pups are influenced by their mother’s social world, often in contradictory ways.