Many terrestrial and aquatic taxa are known to form periodic aggregations, whether across life history or solely during specific life stages, that are generally governed by the availability and distribution of resources. Associations between individuals during such aggregation events are considered random and not driven by social attraction or underlying community structure. White sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) have been described as a species that exhibits resource-driven aggregative behaviors across ontogenetic stages and juvenile white sharks are known to form aggregations at specific nursery sites where individuals may remain for extended periods of time in the presence of other individuals. We hypothesized juvenile white sharks form distinct communities during these critical early phases of ontogeny and discuss how a tendency to co-occur across life stages may be seeded by the formation of these communities in early ontogeny. We present results from a series of social network analyses of 86 juvenile white sharks derived from 6 years of passive acoustic telemetry data in southern California, demonstrating the likelihood of association of tagged juvenile white sharks is greater when sharks are of similar size-classes. Individuals in observed networks exhibited behaviors that best approximated fission-fusion dynamics with spatiotemporally unstable group membership. These results provide evidence of possible non-resource driven co-occurrence and community structure in juvenile white sharks during early life stages.

众所周知，许多陆地和水生分类群会形成周期性聚集，无论是在整个生命史中还是仅在特定生命阶段，通常都受资源的可用性和分布的支配。在这种聚集事件中个体之间的关联被认为是随机的，不受社会吸引力或潜在社区结构的驱动。白鲨（石斑鱼) 已被描述为一种在个体发育阶段表现出资源驱动的聚集行为的物种，并且已知幼年白鲨在特定的保育地点形成聚集，在这些地点，个体可能会在其他个体在场的情况下停留很长时间。我们假设幼年白鲨在个体发育的这些关键早期阶段形成不同的群落，并讨论如何通过这些群落在个体发育早期的形成来播种跨生命阶段共同发生的趋势。我们展示了对来自加利福尼亚南部 6 年被动声学遥测数据的 86 只幼年白鲨进行的一系列社交网络分析的结果，表明当鲨鱼的体型相似时，标记的幼年白鲨关联的可能性更大。观察到的网络中的个体表现出的行为最接近具有时空不稳定群体成员资格的裂变融合动力学。这些结果为幼年白鲨在生命早期阶段可能存在非资源驱动的共生和群落结构提供了证据。