BRC-BIO: The evolutionary demography of a social mammal

社会环境被认为对包括人类在内的社会性哺乳动物的命运起着重要作用。例如，相对于经常经历恶劣环境的社会弱势个体，社会优势个体往往有更多机会获得资源，从而获得更好的健康、更多的后代和更长的寿命。然而，哺乳动物生活中的社会因素如何影响其种群的生态和进化动态尚不清楚。对于社会行为复杂、寿命长、认知能力灵活的哺乳动物（如灵长类动物）来说，这种知识差距进一步加深。该项目试图了解社会性对个体命运的影响是否最终转化为种群水平的过程，使用非人类灵长类动物恒河猴的数据。这一目标将通过建立一个以教育和培训为基础的研究小组来实现，该小组旨在扩大本科生和少数民族服务机构的学生进行定量和实地研究的机会，其中一半以上的学生也来自低收入背景的第一代大学生。通过这种方式，该项目将通过整合培训和指导，为来自不同背景的学员拓宽跨学科生物学和定量技能的机会，为提高STEM研究人员多样性的国家倡议做出贡献。该项目将确定社会驱动的个体差异如何以及为什么对灵长类种群的生态进化动态产生直接和重大的影响，并将目前对个体变异的社会决定因素的研究与进化人口学方法与生活史进化的基本规则联系起来。该项目将采用跨学科的方法，在一个单一的系统中联合检验经验收集的行为、身体和认知因素，然后使用这些数据在波多黎各圣地亚哥岛的一大群恒河猴（Macaca mulatta）中测试社会环境的生态进化后果。第一个目标是描述社会驱动的个体表型分布，包括身体和认知特征，贯穿整个生命周期。这将被用来测试身体和认知表型是否因个体的社会地位而异。第二个目标是在人口的社会结构中量化表型依赖的人口统计学表现。在这里，人口统计学模型将使用观察到的个体表型和社会性之间的关联，从目标1制定。第三个目的是通过检查选择的强度和方向在不同的社会阶层中是如何变化的，来测试社会性是否会在人口统计学和生活史描述符上产生选择梯度。为此，Aim 2中的参数化人口统计学模型将用于对表型-人口统计学函数进行联合扰动分析。该框架将用于评估社会性是否支持驱动种群内生态进化过程的个体表型的出现和维持。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.