Whitney Hansen

Sociality shapes how animals acquire resources, avoid risk, and persist across landscapes, yet a critical dimension of social systems remains poorly understood: their stability through time. Social stability - the persistence of social relationships, spatial cohesion, and coordinated behavior - is an emergent property of group-living species that may link individual fitness to population dynamics and community interactions. However, we currently lack a mechanistic understanding of how social stability scales across levels of biological organization in wild systems, and its ramifications on adaptive capacity of wildlife. This project proposes that social stability functions as a central organizing axis of ecological performance. Using African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), an obligate cooperative carnivore whose survival and reproduction depend on coordinated group behavior, I will test how variation in social stability shapes fitness, population performance, and interspecific interactions. This project leverages one of the longest-running carnivore datasets in the world from the Okavango Delta, Botswana. I will (1) develop behavioral and spatial indicators of social stability, (2) quantify how social stability influences individual fitness, juvenile recruitment, and pack persistence, (3) determine whether and how socially stable groups contribute to population-level performance, and (4) test whether social stability in wild dogpacks cascades to interactions within the carnivore community, including scavengers and kleptoparasites. By reframing social organization as a dynamic ecological process, this project advances behavioral, population, and community ecology simultaneously. More broadly, it provides a framework for understanding how stable social systems enhance resilience under climate change, with implications for the conservation of endangered species.