ArticleScientific reports2021
Non-random associations in group housed rats (Rattus norvegicus).
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Through Human Eyes: Owner Insights into the Social Relationships of Pet Rats.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Groups of familiar male rats form unstable partner preferences when play fighting during the juvenile period.iScience · 2025Article
- Joint Simon effect in rats: Validation across two strains and exploratory analysis of the influence of familiarity.PloS one · 2025Article
- Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- Shaping behaviors through social experience and their proposed sensitivity to stress.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Review
- Novel automated method to assess group dynamics reveals deficits in behavioral contagion in rats with social deficits.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Social factors influence solo and rat dyads exploration of an unfamiliar open field.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- An exploratory study of behavioral traits and the establishment of social relationships in female laboratory rats.PloS one · 2023Article
- Opposite-sex associations are linked with annual fitness, but sociality is stable over lifetime.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ecological factors, such as predation, have traditionally been used to explain sociability. However, it is increasingly recognised that individuals within a group do not associate randomly, and that these non-random associations can generate fitness advantages. The majority of the empirical evidence on differentiated associations in group-living mammals, however, comes from a limited number of taxa and we still know very little about their occurrence and characteristics in some highly social species, such as rats (Rattus spp.). Here, using network analysis, we quantified association patterns in four groups of male fancy rats. We found that the associations between rats were not randomly distributed and that most individuals had significantly more preferred/avoided associates than expected by random. We also found that these preferences can be stable over time, and that they were not influenced by individuals' rank position in the dominance hierarchy. Our findings are consistent with work in other mammals, but contrast with the limited evidence available for other rat strains. While further studies in groups with different demographic composition are warranted to confirm our findings, the occurrence of differentiated associations in all male groups of rats have important implications for the management and welfare of captive rat populations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.