Animals may not make use of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, but many of them form social networks that are complex and have a drastic effect on the survival of the members of that community and of other communities.

The social status of an individual influences basically every aspect of its life, be it feeding, reproducing, becoming sick or surviving from an attack. But how is social status acquired?

There is an intense debate among biologists studying animal populations, recently seeing a greater involvement of mathematicians, to understand how social networks arise.

The more traditional line of thought advocates that social status is ‘genetically inherited’, in that certain traits are passed on from the mum to the offspring. Recent studies suggest that social status might be more ‘socially inherited’, in that the offspring copies its mother’s social network, thus making a connection with its mother’s connections.

The latter theory has brought to the fore the need to develop networks using graph-theoretical approaches to analyse the socialisation aspects of different species in the hope of generating an understanding of the dynamics of these networks.

Understanding animal social networks and how these networks function is critical if we want to protect these species and to conserve precious natural resources, and it might also shed some light on how human social networks formed and evolved historically.