Young-boy networks in long-tailed manakins: it’s not who you know, it’s when you knew them

Long-tailed Manakins form very complex networks of male-male relationships, with alpha-beta pairs performing cooperative courtship displays in the context of a tropical lek mating system. Network theory, widely used for analysis of such complex systems as genomes or the Internet, provides a framework for quantifying and comparing social relationships among males and females through time and among species. Early network connectivity within the manakin social network predicts male success an average of 4.8 years later. «Information centrality» is a network connectivity metric that accounts for indirect as well as shortest (geodesic) paths among interactors. The odds that males would rise socially rose by a factor of five for each one-unit increase in their early information centrality. Connectivity of males destined to rise did not change over time but increased in males that failed to rise socially. The results suggest that network connectivity is important for young males (ages 1-6) but less so for older males of high status (ages 10-15) and that it is difficult to explain present success without reference to social history. Social network theory promises to be an important tool for analyzing social behavior in many different contexts such as cooperative breeders, colonial waterbird species and flocking species.