Environmental Structuring Of Individual Action In A Social Mammal

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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.