![]() More generally, we suggest that it is important to consider context when interpreting species centrality and importance in network structure.īangal P, Sridhar H, Shanker K (2021) Phenotypic clumping decreases with flock richness in mixed-species bird flocks. We propose that examining species structural importance at different flock-richness values provides insights into biologically meaningful functional roles of species. We argue that the link between structural importance of species in mixed-species flock networks and their functional significance in the community critically depends on the social context: namely, the species richness of the mixed-species flock. We also find that assortment is higher in two-species flocks and decreases with an increase in the number of species in the flock (‘flock richness’ hereafter). ![]() We find significant differences in flocks of different richness in that different species emerge as structurally important across flocks of varying richness. We constructed both raw and filtered networks while our results are largely correlated, we believe that filtered networks can provide insights into community-level importance of species in mixed-flocks while raw networks depict flock-level patterns. ![]() Specifically, we ask how the structural importance of a species and the clustering patterns of species relationships depends on species richness in mixed-species flocks. Hence, in this study, we examine context dependent changes in species importance and assortment in mixed-species bird flocks from a tropical field site in Southern India using social network analysis. However, in large heterospecific groups, many pairwise interactions are not realised, while others may not be biologically significant, confounding inferences about species importance. Heterospecific groups are often characterized by important species that contribute more to group initiation, maintenance or function than other species. Interdependencies in social groups of animals are a combination of multiple pairwise interactions.
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