BRC-BIO: The evolutionary demography of a social mammal

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The social environment is thought to play a major role in the fate of social mammals, including humans. For example, socially advantaged individuals often have more access to resources resulting in better health, more offspring, and longer lives, relative to socially disadvantaged individuals who often experience harsher environments. However, it is still unclear how social aspects in the life of mammals affect the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of their populations. This knowledge gap deepens for mammals with complex social behaviors, long lifespan, and flexible cognitive abilities such as primates. This project seeks to understand whether the effects of sociality on individual fates ultimately translates into population-level processes using data of rhesus macaques, a nonhuman primate. This goal will be accomplished by establishing a research team built on a foundation of education and training aimed at broadening opportunities for quantitative and field research for students at a Primarily Undergraduate and a Minority-Serving Institution where over half of the total student body also comes from first-generation college, low-income backgrounds. In this way, this project will contribute to the national initiative of increasing diversity of the STEM research workforce by integrating training and mentorship to broaden access to interdisciplinary biology and quantitative skills to mentees from diverse backgrounds.This project will identify how and why socially driven individual differences have direct and significant effects on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a primate population, linking current research in the social determinants of individual variability to evolutionary demography approaches to the fundamental rules of life history evolution. The project will take an interdisciplinary approach by jointly examining empirically collected behavioral, physical, and cognitive factors within a single system, and then using this data to test the eco-evolutionary consequences of the social environment in a large population of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) at Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. The first aim is to characterize the distribution of socially driven individual phenotypes, comprising both physical and cognitive traits, across the lifespan. This will be used to test whether physical and cognitive phenotypes vary across individuals in relation to their social status. The second aim is to quantify phenotype-dependent demographic performance across the population’s social structure. Here, a demographic model will be formulated using the observed associations between individual phenotypes and sociality from Aim 1. The third aim is to test whether sociality generates selection gradients on demographic and life history descriptors by examining how the strength and direction of selection varies across social stratification. For this, the parameterized demographic model from Aim 2 will be used to carry out joint perturbation analyses on phenotype-demography functions. This framework will be used to evaluate whether sociality supports the emergence and maintenance of individual phenotypes driving eco-evolutionary processes within populations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.