Early-life experience determines the social stability of adult communities in female mice

Abstract

Early social interactions critically shape lifelong individual behaviour but their development and stability have been difficult to study in laboratory settings. Our experimental platform allows the automated real-time and longitudinal study of social structure in mice living in a shared environment, providing previously inaccessible behavioural measures. These include estimates of directed agonistic activity for the reconstruction of social hierarchies and their dynamics over the life-course. In an all-female colony of genetically identical mice, pairwise inter-individual interactions revealed stable dominance hierarchies that already emerged early in life. Older animals introduced into a new colony exhibited a steeper hierarchy compared to adolescent mice or mature mice that had been co-housed throughout life. Our longitudinal analysis of social dominance hierarchies highlights the critical role of early-life experience. One-Sentence SummaryAutomated tracking of mouse colonies revealed differences in social structure dependent on the animals early-life experience.