Environmental Structuring Of Individual Action In A Social Mammal

社会哺乳动物个体行为的环境结构

• 批准号: RGPIN-2018-03903
• 负责人: Henzi, Stephanus
• 金额: $ 2.4万
• 依托单位: University of Lethbridge
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2019-01-01 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=684693
• 关键词: Environmental; Structuring; Individual; Action; Social

My research addresses the ways in which individual members of primate groups primarily African vervet monkeys deal with the manifold, interacting challenges posed by their physical, ecological and social environments. I am particularly interested in the constraints imposed on their responses by the fact that their sociality is obligate, by which I mean that the need for close coexistence imposes direct problems, such as increased local competition for resources, while limits on the ability to move independently of others, for example, also curb the range of available solutions. My long-term interest in these issues ties to the nature of and selective forces driving social cognition. In the shorter-term, en route to this goal, my students and I intend to document the nature of the challenges as well as the variability of the responses of different individuals to problems posed in three distinct arenas. First, we will use parasite loads and the occurrence of fevers to examine the extent to which different group members are both susceptible and exposed to infections. Central to this is our focus on social integration, as a means whereby animals can buffer themselves from infection via lower stress levels, particular social network positions, which may either inhibit or enhance the transmission of infection, and global social network structure, which we hope will reveal the ability of animals to detect infection in others and adjust their interaction profiles to reduce the risk of illness. As climate change is rapidly exposing animals to new and increased infection risks, we also wish to probe the behaviour of animals in relation to their levels of infection to see if we can devise an index of health, hopefully absolute as well as relative, that can be used to monitor vervet populations across time and in different locations. Second, we will follow up on our discovery that female vervets can outrank males and influence their rank trajectories, despite being physically smaller, by considering the dynamics of both male-female and male-male relationships from the moment that males join a group. The driving question in both cases is how males respond to the unusual fact that, in this species, females hold significant reproductive power. We expect to see males cultivating females, and competing with one another to do so, with females responding preferentially to particular males, with whom they are more likely to mate subsequently. Third, we wish to take advantage of the high rates of aggressive intergroup interactions in our study population to explore the factors that lead some individuals, but not others, to participate at a potentially high risk to themselves. We hope to identify patterns of social interaction that bind participants together and show that these are robust to changes in individual identity, as well as to describe the route whereby young animals are inducted as participants.

我的研究涉及灵长类动物群体（主要是非洲长尾猴）的个体成员如何处理其物理，生态和社会环境所带来的多种相互作用的挑战。我特别感兴趣的是，他们的社会性是强制性的，这一事实对他们的反应施加了限制，我的意思是，密切共存的需要带来了直接的问题，例如增加了当地对资源的竞争，而对独立于他人的移动能力的限制，例如，也限制了可用解决方案的范围。我对这些问题的长期兴趣与驱动社会认知的性质和选择性力量有关。在短期内，在实现这一目标的过程中，我和我的学生打算记录挑战的性质以及不同个体对三个不同领域提出的问题的反应的可变性。首先，我们将使用寄生虫负荷和发热的发生来检查不同群体成员对感染的易感性和暴露程度。其中的核心是我们关注社会融合，作为一种手段，动物可以通过较低的压力水平，特定的社会网络位置，这可能会抑制或增强感染的传播，以及全球社会网络结构，来缓冲自己的感染，我们希望这将揭示动物检测他人感染的能力，并调整它们的互动模式，以减少疾病的风险。由于气候变化正在迅速使动物暴露于新的和增加的感染风险，我们还希望探索动物的行为与其感染水平的关系，看看我们是否可以设计一个健康指数，希望是绝对的和相对的，可以用来监测不同时间和不同地点的长尾猴种群。第二，我们将继续我们的发现，即女性长尾雉可以超过男性，并影响他们的排名轨迹，尽管身体较小，通过考虑从男性加入一个群体的那一刻起，男性与女性和男性与男性的关系的动态。在这两种情况下，驱动问题是雄性如何应对这个不寻常的事实，即在这个物种中，雌性拥有显着的生殖能力。我们希望看到雄性培育雌性，并相互竞争，雌性优先回应特定的雄性，他们更有可能随后与之交配。第三，我们希望利用我们研究人群中积极的组间互动的高比率来探索导致一些个体而不是其他个体参与潜在高风险的因素。我们希望识别出将参与者联系在一起的社会互动模式，并表明这些模式对个体身份的变化具有鲁棒性，以及描述年轻动物被引导为参与者的路线。