Social network analysis
Finally, social network analysis can also reveal important fluctuations in animal behaviors across changing environments. For example, network analyses in female chacma baboons ("Papio hamadryas ursinus") revealed important dynamic changes across seasons that were previously unknown; instead of creating stable, long-lasting social bonds with friends, baboons were found to exhibit more variable relationships which were dependent on short-term contingencies related to group-level dynamics as well as environmental variability. Changes in an individual's social network environment can also influence characteristics such as 'personality': for example, social spiders that huddle with bolder neighbors tend to increase also in boldness. This is a very small set of broad examples of how researchers can use network analysis to study animal behavior. Research in this area is currently expanding very rapidly, especially since the broader development of animal-borne tags and computer vision can be used to automate the collection of social associations. Social network analysis is a valuable tool for studying animal behavior across all animal species and has the potential to uncover new information about animal behavior and social ecology that was previously poorly understood.