About this Research Topic
The most significant hurdle to overcome in trying to understand social behavior in the marine environment is logistics – how best to record, store and retrieve data on the associations and interactions of wide-ranging, underwater animals. Two ways to tackle this challenge are to find study systems that can be reliably observed over relevant spatial and temporal scales (e.g. long-term monitoring of cetaceans resident in coastal waters), or to deploy biologging technologies that are capable of recording the fine-scale position of many individuals simultaneously. There are burgeoning examples of studies that have defined the social network structure of sharks, for example, based on regular diver observations or machine learning applied to acoustic tracking data. With a growing number of researchers beginning to work in this field, this Research Topic will bring these individuals and research groups together to showcase the very latest in state-of-the-art technological and analytical approaches to reveal sociality in the marine environment.
It is our aim that this Research Topic will attract broad and diverse submissions from a host of researchers studying a variety of taxa from marine mammals, elasmobranchs and teleost fishes to invertebrates tracked with electronic tags. The Topic will also attempt to tackle some of the logistical/methodological barriers to progress and offer new ways as to how these might be overcome, for example how to retrieve tracking data from individuals even if peer-to-peer communication becomes more viable. Therefore the scope of submissions should fall into the following broad categories:
• Exciting new technological, methodological or analytic advances for measuring social behavior /structure in the marine environment
• Empirical studies from new taxa, previously unrecognized as being social
• Studies that involve manipulations that attempt to reveal the underlying mechanisms behind sociality
• Reviews of particular taxonomic groups where sociality has been explored more broadly (e.g. cetaceans)
The Topic Editors would like to acknowledge the following for providing the cover images:
Ewa Krzyszczyk, Shark Bay Dolphin Research Project (top left)
David Villegas-Ríos (top right)
Johann Mourier (bottom left)
Culum Brown (bottom right)
Keywords: Behavioural inference, Network analysis, Photo identification, Social structure, Telemetry
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.