The social lives of rabbits: understanding the structure and consequences of sociality

Recent research has found connections between social structure and fitness in several species, including humans. However, the pathways by which social structure affects fitness remain largely unknown. Several have been proposed: for example well-connected individuals could be in a better position to learn beneficial social information, or have more reliable cooperative partners- but well-connected individuals may also be more likely to contract socially transmitted diseases. Disentangling the pathways by which social structure affects fitness is a major outstanding question in social evolution. Attempts to answer this question have, to date, focussed on long-lived slow-reproducing species such as primates and cetaceans. But sociality is widespread in nature and remains unclear how the social environment can affect fitness in other taxa with different life histories. Enter rabbits. European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) are obligately social, but the structure of their social environment, and how it affects them, remains largely unknown. They also have a fast life-history with short lifespans are rapid reproduction, making them the ideal system to investigate the links between social structure and fitness. In this project a student will use the European rabbit population inhabiting the University of Exeter Campus to understand the mechanisms by which sociality can affect survival in a fast-living obligatory social mammal. By observing the behaviour of marked rabbits in the wild we build up a picture of the space use and social interactions of individual rabbits. There is also the potential to explore the use of technology such as proximity tags to get more detailed social data. Over the course of the study the student will monitor all births and deaths in the population which we can then link to social structure, ecology of the individual rabbits to understand the mechanisms linked social structure and fitness in a novel field system.