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，但灵长类动物的营养和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，以应对我们最接近的近亲之一--猩猩的营养供应的自然变化。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环境中的觅食结合起来，提供了一个自然的实验来研究营养、能量、生理健康和健康之间的多维关系。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种群的影响提供新的见解。它还将提供跨学科研究和培训机会，并促进来自罗格斯大学代表性不足群体的本科生和研究生的STEM研究。此外，几名美国学生将参加一个在印度尼西亚的名为“灵长类动物、生态和保护”的印尼留学项目，在那里他们将与印尼学生同行一起学习应用的生态方法和保护实践。该项目将在研究和能力发展的各个层面促进国际合作和关系，从而支持实地保护和研究的长期成功。本项目研究饮食营养、能量平衡、压力和免疫的相互作用性质，以了解灵长类动物的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，以及营养、生理和免疫学数据。该项目将回答以下问题：猩猩的营养景观如何随季节变化？猩猩如何应对这种变化--通过严格控制它们的大量营养素(即脂肪、蛋白质、碳水化合物)的摄入量，还是通过改变它们的营养策略来与营养格局相匹配？能量平衡、压力、免疫功能和寄生虫感染如何随着营养策略的变化而变化？这个项目不仅将为猩猩进化生态学提供强大的新见解，而且还将为灵长类和其他动物的营养生态学研究设定一个新的基准，有助于为建立该模型的实验室范例提供信息，并提供一个非人类的类似物，为现代环境中人类的营养生态模型提供信息。

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.