Solitary
Species that live on their own and seek company only in order to breed.
What it means
A species' social structure explains a great deal about its behaviour: how it defends territory, how it raises young, even the size of its brain. A solitary species holds a territory of its own, hunts or forages alone, and meets others of its kind only in the breeding season or at a heavily concentrated resource. It is by some distance the commonest way of life in the catalogue, and it does not mean isolation: almost all of them keep up a network of chemical, acoustic or visual signals with their neighbours.
Species
Gallery
