I happened upon an interesting paper in Animal Behaviour by Stanley and Dunbar about social network analysis in feral goats. They studied two disparate populations of feral goats and the relationship among female social bonds, behavior and spatial correlates. The authors found that across the two populations social network size was stable and the clique size was consistently around 12-13 goats. These stable bonds are correlated with decreased aggression from female to female and a maintained level of proximity. See the figure below which illustrates the weighted social network based on approach rate behavior. The thickness of the line indicates the strength of the bond, and while the blue dots are main players in the clique all other colors represent outliers. This suggests that even in the feral goat world, Jessica is always a bitchy girl’s name and all the cool kids wear blue.
From Stanley and Dunbar 2013, Figure 2a
