Today I published a paper - not headline-grabbing or especially policy-relevant - but I'm proud of it because it solves a problem I've wanted to understand for years: how African wild dog populations work 
Wild dogs are highly social. So social it was thought that small packs could not survive. Hence any threat which reduced pack size could cause population extinction.
In particular, it was assumed that small packs would produce small dispersal groups (if any) forming more small packs - so there would be an extinction vortex driven in part by the animals' own social behaviour
Testing this sort of idea is very difficult because you need years and years of data. Dispersal groups form quite rarely and it's hard to track their fates. Monitoring packs of different sizes takes time and a large sample of a rare species.
It turns out wild dog packs have a limited lifespan. They very seldom accept immigrants, so over time the dominant pair become the only animals not related to each other - all the others are their offspring
So when one of the alphas dies, all the survivors are close relatives. There are no potential mates. Usually, the pack breaks up into single-sex groups, to form new packs with opposite-sex dispersal groups from other packs.
Larger packs produce more pups than smaller packs. However, smaller packs produce more pups per adult. So small packs grow larger over time.
Members of larger packs have higher survival though.
If larger packs produce more pups AND survive better, why don't they grow larger and larger and larger? Because young adults of both sexes disperse away looking for mates. As a consequence, large packs grow slowly or shrink, while smaller packs grow larger.
So dispersal - animals leaving their natal packs to form their own new packs - is central to wild dog population dynamics. If there was no dispersal there would be no new packs to replace the old ones that die off or break up
But dispersal is ultimately driven by inbreeding avoidance. Young wild dogs have to disperse to reproduce, because there are no unrelated mates in the packs where they're born. Because packs don't accept immigrants.
The exception proves the rule: we had ONE case of immigration in 17 years (a male), which led to the only case of an animal (a female) inheriting alpha status in the pack where she was born.
This central importance of social organisation, and dispersal in particular, makes wild dog populations difficult to model, as @TomSmallwood1 and @DaniRabaiotti can attest. But modelling wild dog populations is important to evaluate threats like disease and climate change.
You can read the paper itself here besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…
