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. 2017 Aug 1;7:6991. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-07233-5

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Determination of the social hierarchy in a group-housing cage. The social hierarchy in a home cage was determined from the home-cage dyadic agonistic interactions. The mouse that exhibited offensive behaviour and elicited submissiveness from all other mice was designated the dominant mouse. Mice that exhibited submissive behaviour to other mice but never dominated another cage mate were designated subordinate. (a) Type 1: a linear hierarchy was estimated when the relationships between individuals were transitive (i.e., if mouse A dominated mice B, C and D, mouse D dominated mice B and C, and mouse C dominated mouse B). In this manner, the dominant and subordinate males were defined as the individuals with the highest and lowest ranking, respectively, and the mice intermediate between the dominant and subordinate males were considered to be intermediate males. (b) Type 2: two subordinates were identified when no agonistic interactions were observed between the two lowest ranking mice. (c) Type 3: a case with one dominant and three subordinate mice.