When and how can Group Composition be locally adapted? A test with Social Spiders.

社会是否或如何能够察觉到表现不佳的群体构成，并在不同的环境中对其做出适应性反应，目前尚不清楚。群体构成，即具有不同特征的个人的相对代表，通常被认为是社会群体组织和成功的主要决定因素。一些团体自然而然地展示出有助于它们蓬勃发展的成分，而另一些团体则表现出导致它们灭亡的混合物。一个可驯服的社会(社会蜘蛛)将被用来评估种群组成的变化如何影响整个社会的增长、繁殖率和灭绝风险。将在不同的外地地点建立和部署不同混合的社团，并将随着时间的推移跟踪这些社团的成功情况。此外，随着时间的推移，将监测社会构成的变化，以查看社会是否能够感知其不良构成并自适应地改变它们。拟议的工作将进一步加深我们对社会作为集体实体如何发展和适应当前挑战的理解。这在从医学到农业和保护的各个领域都有影响。生物学的几乎每个方面都对了解物种灭绝的驱动因素感兴趣：农民希望根除害虫并保存品种；流行病学家希望将世界上的病原体赶尽杀绝；而保护生物学家希望在保护日益减少的原住民的同时根除入侵的害虫物种。了解一群有机体(如群居蜘蛛)在正常情况下如何感知和应对即将到来的灭绝风险，可能有助于我们预测在其他分类群中可能加速、减缓或规避灭绝的因素，在这些分类群中，严格的实验通常是不可能的。最后，许多本科生和K-12年级的学生将参与该项目的实施以及调查结果的传播。每年有十几名高中教师帮助收集、分析和传播这些研究的结果，匹兹堡大学的本科生接受实地生态学家和科学方法的现场培训。

Whether or how societies are able to sense poor-performing group compositions and respond to them adaptively across different environments remains unknown. Group composition, or the relative representation of individuals with different traits, is often thought to be a major determinant of social group organization and success. Some groups naturally exhibit compositions which help them flourish and others express mixtures that yield their demise. A tractable society (social spiders) will be used to assess how variation in group composition influences the growth, reproductive rate, and extinction risk of entire societies. Societies of different mixtures will be generated and deployed at different field sites, and the success of these societies will be tracked over time. Additionally, the shifts in societies' composition will be monitored over time, in order to see whether societies are able to sense their ailing compositions and shift them adaptively. The proposed work will further our understanding of how societies, as collective entities, evolve and adjust adaptively to current challenges. This has implications in fields ranging from medicine, to agriculture, and conservation. Virtually every aspect of biology is interested in understanding the drivers of extinction: farmers want to eradicate pests and preserve cultivars; epidemiologists want to drive world pathogens to extinction; while conservation biologists hope to eradicate invasive pest species while preserving dwindling natives. Understanding how groups of organisms (like social spiders) sense and respond to pending extinction risk under normal circumstances might help us predict the factors that can accelerate, slow, or circumvent extinction in other taxa where rigorous experiments are not generally possible. Finally, numerous undergraduates and K-12 students will be involved with elements of the project's implementation as well as the dissemination of the findings. Each year more than a dozen high school teachers help to collect, analyze, and disseminate the findings of these studies, and undergraduates from the University of Pittsburgh gain on-site training on field ecologists and the scientific method.