Michael N. Weiss

TL;DR: It is found that the social position of male, but not female, killer whales in their social unit predicts their mortality risk, and observable variation in the social environment is linked to variation in mortality risk.

TL;DR: It is shown that datastream permutations typically do not represent the null hypothesis of interest to researchers interfacing animal social network analysis with regression modelling, and simulations are used to demonstrate the potential pitfalls of using this methodology.

TL;DR: It is shown that grandmothers increase the survival of their grandoffspring, and these effects are greatest when grandmothers are no longer reproducing, which can help explain the long postreproductive life spans of resident killer whales.

TL;DR: This work shows that common datastream permutations used to test the coefficients of regression models can lead to extremely high type I (false-positive) error rates and suggests that a potential solution may be found in regarding the problems of non-independence of network data and unreliability of observations as separate problems with distinct solutions.

TL;DR: The method focusses on the diversity of types of dyadic relationship within the social network and is based on quantifying variation in the strengths of social connections (measured using association indices) which it uses to classify different types of pairwise relationships.