Multi-level societies: different tasks at different social levels

Abstract

Multi-level vertebrate societies, characterized by nested social units, allow individuals to perform a wide range of tasks in cooperation with others beyond their core social unit. In these societies, individuals can selectively interact with specific partners from higher social levels to cooperatively perform distinct tasks. Alternatively, social units of the same level can merge to form higher-level associations, enabling individuals to benefit from large social units without always maintaining a large core social unit. The reasons why multi-level sociality evolves in some systems but not in others are not well understood. We propose that this is partly due to a lack of data, especially regarding the fitness consequences of cooperation at different social levels. First, we argue that in multi-level societies individual fitness benefits should increase when performing tasks in cooperation with associates from higher social levels. Second, as more multi-level societies are documented across taxa, we will continue to find similar cooperative tasks performed at each of the different social levels. By providing compelling species examples, from dolphins to fairy-wrens, we underscore that despite the diversity of multi-level social organization, convergence in task performance across social levels will become clearer as more data accumulates. Finally, we highlight the role of multi-level sociality in buffering fluctuating environmental conditions by enabling flexible social associations to emerge according to need.This article is part of the theme issue 'Division of labour as key driver of social evolution'.

Keywords: animal societies; cooperative relationships; multi-level sociality; partner choice; social complexity; task performance.

Figure 1.

Individuals from multi-level societies perform different tasks when associating with individuals from different social levels. Here, we present one multi-level society that exhibits three levels of social associations: individuals (small white nodes with black outlines) associate preferentially with others from their own core social unit. Then, core social units (intermediate-sized nodes) associate preferentially with each other and form higher-level units (large nodes, termed as communities here), which also have contacts with other neighbouring communities. In panel (A) a focal individual (red) performs ‘Task A—yellow’ only when associating with individuals from its own core social unit, ‘Task B—blue’ when associating with individuals from its own community and ‘Task C– grey’ when associating with individuals from neighbouring communities. In panel (B) we depict a slightly different scenario where all individuals from one core social unit or community merge together with another unit of the same social level and collectively perform tasks A, B or C.