Understanding Age and Society using Natural Populations

使用自然总体了解年龄和社会

• 批准号: BB/S009752/1
• 负责人: Josh Firth
• 金额: $ 38.19万
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FS009752%2F1
• 关键词: Understanding; Age; Society; using; Natural

A major issue facing almost all human societies around the globe is rapid ageing of the population. For example, over the past 40years alone, the average age in the UK has increased from 34 to over-40, and, in the next 30 years, the amount of over-65 year olds is predicted to double from today's number and reach ~20million individuals. As age affects almost all aspects of life, including behaviour, health, and reproduction, these changes in age composition are expected to have enormous consequences for society. But, as this is the first time in history that human populations have ever experienced 'ageing' in this way, it is exceptionally difficult to make predictions regarding these changes. Interestingly, ageing is now known to not only occur in humans, but also across the animal kingdom. A broad range of studies have found evidence of ageing in hundreds of species, ranging from insects to whales. In fact, natural animal populations have become widely accepted as particularly useful for understanding how individuals age, and the mechanisms that underpin how individuals change as they grow older. In this proposal, I demonstrate that natural populations also have great, but previously unrecognized, potential for understanding how societies age, particularly due to the following three complementary reasons: Firstly, unlike the human population (which has never 'aged' before), many animal societies have shown large variation in their population age compositions whilst being monitored. Therefore, this will allow me to develop an understanding of ageing societies based on previous patterns of ageing within the population (instead of relying entirely on predictions into the future). Secondly, recent advances in animal tracking technologies have given rise to hundreds of studies that quantify wild animal social networks in great detail, often over individuals' entire lifetimes and across multiple generations. I propose that such fine-scale datasets will allow the examination of fundamental processes governing how individuals' social behaviour changes as they age, and how this structures societies over time. Finally, experiments are often key to separating 'correlation from causation' across all fields, and this is particularly important in research surrounding sociality (as the behaviour of one individual automatically affects the behaviour of those it interacts with). My previous research has developed a novel method for experimentally manipulating a wild bird social system. I will use this unique approach to determine how individual age directly effects society structure and social processes (such as the development and spread of new information and cooperative behaviour). Therefore, through amassing and analyzing various species' and populations' social networks over time and across various age compositions, along with carrying out social experiments within a model study system, I will take full advantage of the unrecognized opportunities that natural populations offer in terms of gaining novel insights into the interplay between age and society. This research will provide a new understanding of how age shapes individuals' social behaviour and emerging society structure, the ecological and evolutionary forces affecting this effect, and the consequences of age for the fundamental social processes of information transmission and cooperation.

地球仪上几乎所有人类社会都面临的一个主要问题是人口的迅速老龄化。例如，仅在过去的40年里，英国的平均年龄就从34岁增加到40岁以上，在未来的30年里，预计65奥尔兹以上的人数将比今天增加一倍，达到约2000万人。由于年龄影响到生活的几乎所有方面，包括行为、健康和生殖，年龄构成的这些变化预计将对社会产生巨大影响。但是，由于这是人类历史上第一次以这种方式经历“老龄化”，因此很难对这些变化做出预测。有趣的是，现在人们知道衰老不仅发生在人类身上，而且发生在整个动物王国。一系列广泛的研究发现了数百种物种衰老的证据，从昆虫到鲸鱼。事实上，自然动物种群已被广泛接受，因为它对理解个体如何衰老以及个体如何随着年龄的增长而变化的机制特别有用。在这个建议中，我证明了自然种群也有很大的，但以前未被认识到，了解社会如何老化的潜力，特别是由于以下三个互补的原因：第一，不像人类人口（从来没有“老”之前），许多动物社会已经显示出很大的变化，在他们的人口年龄组成，而被监测。因此，这将使我能够根据人口中以前的老龄化模式（而不是完全依赖于对未来的预测）来理解老龄化社会。其次，动物追踪技术的最新进展引发了数百项研究，这些研究非常详细地量化了野生动物的社交网络，通常是在个体的整个生命周期和多代人之间。我建议，这种精细规模的数据集将允许检查的基本过程，管理个人的社会行为如何随着年龄的增长而变化，以及如何随着时间的推移，这结构的社会。最后，实验通常是在所有领域中分离“相关性与因果关系”的关键，这在围绕社会性的研究中尤为重要（因为一个人的行为会自动影响与之互动的人的行为）。我以前的研究开发了一种新的方法来实验性地操纵野生鸟类的社会系统。我将使用这种独特的方法来确定个人年龄如何直接影响社会结构和社会进程（如新信息的发展和传播以及合作行为）。因此，通过积累和分析不同物种和种群的社交网络随着时间的推移和不同的年龄组成，沿着在一个模型研究系统中进行社会实验，我将充分利用自然种群提供的未被认识的机会，获得新的见解年龄和社会之间的相互作用。这项研究将提供一个新的理解年龄如何塑造个人的社会行为和新兴的社会结构，影响这种影响的生态和进化力量，以及年龄对信息传输和合作的基本社会过程的后果。

项目成果

Assessing information-sharing networks within small-scale fisheries and the implications for conservation interventions.

• DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211240
• 发表时间: 2021-11
• 期刊: Royal Society open science
• 影响因子: 3.5
• 作者: Arlidge WNS;Firth JA;Alfaro-Shigueto J;Ibanez-Erquiaga B;Mangel JC;Squires D;Milner-Gulland EJ
• 通讯作者: Milner-Gulland EJ

Social learning mechanisms shape transmission pathways through replicate local social networks of wild birds

• DOI: 10.1101/2022.06.23.497351
• 发表时间: 2022-12
• 期刊: eLife
• 影响因子: 7.7
• 作者: Kristina B. Beck;B. Sheldon;J. A. Firth

Assessing information-sharing networks within small-scale fisheries and the implications for conservation interventions

评估小型渔业内的信息共享网络及其对保护干预措施的影响

• DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-96096/v1
• 发表时间: 2020
• 作者: Arlidge W

Supplementary material from "Assessing information-sharing networks within small-scale fisheries and the implications for conservation interventions"

补充材料来自“评估小型渔业内的信息共享网络及其对保护干预措施的影响”

• DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.16988094
• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: Arlidge W