Challenging environments and nutritional immunology in wild primates

营养对人类和其他灵长类动物的免疫力和病原体抵抗力至关重要，但灵长类动物营养与健康之间的联系机制尚不完全清楚。这个项目的目标是确定营养策略如何调节免疫功能，以响应我们最亲近的亲戚之一，猩猩的营养可用性的自然变化。研究野生猩猩提供了一个独特的机会，将代谢生理学和免疫与生态背景下的觅食结合起来，提供了一个自然实验来研究营养、能量学、生理健康和健康的多维关系。该项目将为灵长类动物营养策略的可塑性、其潜在原因及其对灵长类动物种群的影响提供新的见解。它还将为罗格斯大学（Rutgers University）来自代表性不足群体的本科生和研究生提供跨学科研究和培训机会，并促进STEM研究。此外，几名美国学生将参加一个在印度尼西亚进行的名为“印度尼西亚的灵长类动物、生态和保护”的海外学习项目，在那里他们将与印尼学生同行一起学习应用生态学方法和保护实践。该项目将在研究和能力发展的各个层面上促进国际合作和关系，从而支持该地区保护和研究的长期成功。本项目研究了饮食营养、能量平衡、应激和免疫的相互作用性质，以了解灵长类动物营养策略与生理状态之间的联系机制。为了调查这些动态关系，项目人员将结合他们的专业知识，使用创新的实验室和统计方法，收集和分析现场行为和生态数据，并结合营养、生理和免疫学数据。这个项目将回答以下问题：猩猩的营养状况是如何随季节变化的？猩猩是如何应对这种变化的——是通过严格调节宏量营养素（即脂肪、蛋白质、碳水化合物）的摄入，还是通过改变营养策略来适应营养状况？能量平衡、压力、免疫功能和寄生虫感染如何随营养策略而变化？该项目不仅为猩猩进化生态学提供了强有力的新见解，而且还将为灵长类动物和其他动物的营养生态学研究树立新的基准，有助于为其建模的实验室范式提供信息，并为现代环境中人类营养生态学的模型提供非人类模拟物。

Nutrition is critical to immunity and pathogen resistance in humans and other primates, but the mechanisms that link nutrition and well-being in primates are not fully understood. The goal of this project is to determine how nutritional strategy modulates immune function in response to natural variation in nutrient availability in one of our closest living relatives, orangutans. Studying wild orangutans offers a unique opportunity to integrate metabolic physiology and immunity with foraging in an ecological context, providing a natural experiment to examine the multi-dimensional relationships of nutrition, energetics, physiological well-being and fitness. This project will provide new insights into the plasticity of primate nutritional strategies, their underlying causes, and their consequences for primate populations. It will also provide interdisciplinary research and training opportunities and promote STEM research for undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented groups at Rutgers University. In addition, several American students will participate in a study abroad program in Indonesia entitled "Primates, Ecology, and Conservation in Indonesia," where they will learn applied ecological methods and conservation practices together with Indonesian student counterparts. The project will foster international collaborations and relationships at all levels of research and capacity development, thereby supporting the long-term success of conservation and research at the field location. This project examines the interactive nature of dietary nutrition, energy balance, stress, and immunity, to understand mechanisms linking nutritional strategy to physiological status in primates. To investigate these dynamic relationships, the project personnel will combine their expertise to collect and analyze field behavioral and ecological data combined with nutritional, physiological, and immunological data using innovative laboratory and statistical approaches. This project will answer the following questions: How does the nutritional landscape of orangutans vary seasonally? How do orangutans cope with this variation -- by strictly regulating their intake of macronutrients (i.e., fats, protein, carbohydrates), or by changing their nutritional strategy to match the nutritional landscape? How do energy balance, stress, immune function, and parasite infections vary with nutritional strategy? Not only will this project provide powerful new insights into orangutan evolutionary ecology, but it will also set a new benchmark for nutritional ecology studies in primates and other animals, help to inform the laboratory paradigm on which it is modeled, and provide a non-human analogue to inform models concerning the nutritional ecology of humans in modern environments.