Eastern water dragons modify their social tactics with respect to the location within their home range

Abstract

Animals may modify their behaviour towards conspecifics to manage social conflict that arises due to group living. Given that social conflict is likely to vary through space, we would expect individuals to adjust their social behaviour, accordingly, across their home range. This, however, remains to be explicitly investigated. Here, we used a longitudinal behavioural data set on eastern water dragons, Intellagama lesueurii, a social reptile, to investigate the extent to which social tactics (individual patterns of long-term social preferences and avoidances) vary across individuals' home ranges. We found that expression of both social tactics increased within the core home range, which also coincided with increased population density and frequency of agonistic displays. Furthermore, we found that the magnitude of this spatial behavioural shift was sex dependent, with females exhibiting a greater increase in both social tactics than males. Together, our results illustrate that dragons modify their social tactics across space, highlighting the importance of accounting for the spatial dimension when studying social behaviour. Our observations further suggest that spatial social plasticity may be key to balancing costs associated with increased social conflict. We encourage new studies to test this link, which may provide important insight into the adaptive significance of spatial social plasticity.