The influence of sociality, stress levels and personality traits on individual participation in intergroup encounters in vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus).

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How group-living animals cooperate and achieve successful collective action for resource defense and how they establish relationships between neighboring groups has recently become a central topic in the study of animal behavior. Several factors can affect the outcome of group encounters on the group level, as for example differences in group size. However, recent studies demonstrated that advantages in the number of actual participants are even more crucial for the outcome of encounters. These findings suggest that in order to understand collective resource defense it is crucial to include the individual characteristics that can affect the participation in group encounters. In this project I propose to investigate how sociality, stress levels and personality traits influence the individual participation in group encounters in three habituated groups of wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) in South Africa. Here, I will combine behavioral and physiological data from two datasets. The first dataset is already available for the project, and includes detailed information on 1124 group encounters (including information on participating individuals), behavioral data (from where I will construct the social networks to infer sociality), and fecal cortisol levels of all individuals in the three study groups from the same period when the group encounters were observed. The second dataset will include data on personality traits based on experiments that I will conduct in the field. The principles and challenges of cooperation are consistent over a range of collective actions, with variable individual contribution. Therefore, the investigation of the aspects proposed in this project will contribute not only to the knowledge on cooperation in resource defense but to the general comprehension of cooperation and the dynamics of collective action in group-living animals.