The Impact of Maternal Effects on Social Plasticity and Fitness Variation in a Long-Lived Mammal

对灵长类、大象和海豚等长寿的社会性哺乳动物的研究一再表明，个体的社会行为与生存和繁殖有关。然而，很少有人研究过哪些因素会导致物种或种群内社会行为的个体差异。例如，为什么有些人比其他人更合群还有待确定。在哺乳动物中，众所周知，母亲对后代的行为发展有着广泛的影响，不仅通过遗传，还通过社会学习（母亲效应）。在这里，研究小组将重点关注母体效应如何影响后代的社会发展，这是社会行为个体差异的关键因素。在澳大利亚的鲨鱼湾，海豚是研究这些问题的一个很好的经验系统，因为它们生活在一个开放而充满活力的大型社会社区中，有100多个潜在的伙伴可供选择。关于这个社会系统的长期数据跨越了35年以上，使这个科学家团队能够量化：1）。海豚在其发育过程中如何在空间和时间上改变其社会行为，2）。这在多大程度上受到母体和非母体效应的影响，以及3）。母体效应为后代提供健康益处的程度。这项研究将具有广泛的影响力，吸引力和影响力，远远超出科学界，因为它将有助于野生动物政策，管理和保护，以及培养多个本科生和研究生以及早期职业阶段的研究人员在干。虽然有几项研究将长寿哺乳动物的社会性与健身联系起来，但母体对社会性（例如动态社会模式）和健身结果的个体间和个体内变化的影响相对未被探索。这项研究调查了社会性是如何进化的，而不仅仅是为什么。最近的计算进步使这个项目能够纳入多层次的动态变化，以促进对社会性如何进化的理解，即，传输路径。这项研究系统是一项为期35年的野生海豚纵向研究，由于物种特征以及数据集的大小，细节和长期性质，为解决这些问题提供了独特的机会。本项目将采用：用途：1）。新的定量遗传学方法，以揭示母亲对社会行为的影响的重要性，同时考虑加性遗传变异和母亲的社会环境; 2）。下一代测序与人口统计学数据相结合，以从高密度单核苷酸多态性构建准确的谱系信息; 3）.动态社会网络建模（社会关联/交互矩阵），以说明个体的不断变化的社会属性，而不仅仅是静态特征。因此，这项研究将是一个全面的探索如何母性效应影响社会特征在整个生命周期内，并在一个进化的框架内跨越一代以上。此外，这是第一项在具有广泛母体社会传播的野生长寿哺乳动物中进行的研究，同时考虑了添加剂遗传变异。这些结果将通过扩展我们对遗传和非遗传遗传机制的研究提供重大进展，这些遗传机制在进化和对环境变化的反应中起着关键作用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Studies of long-lived social mammals such as primates, elephants and dolphins repeatedly show that individual social behavior is linked to survival and reproduction. Yet, few have examined what factors contribute to individual variation in social behavior within a species or population. For instance, it has yet be to determined why some individuals are more gregarious than others. In mammals, it is known that mothers have a pervasive influence on offspring behavioral development, not just through genetic inheritance, but also through social learning (maternal effects). Here, the research team will focus on how maternal effects influence offspring social development, a key contributor to individual variation in social behavior. Dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, are an excellent empirical system for examining these questions because they live in a large open and dynamic social community with over one hundred potential associates to choose from. Long-term data on this social system spans 35+ years and enables this team of scientists to quantify: 1). how a dolphin changes its social behavior in space and time throughout its development, 2). the extent to which this is influenced by maternal and non-maternal effects, and 3). the extent to which maternal effects provide fitness benefits to offspring. This study will have broad reach, appeal, and implications well beyond the scientific community because it will contribute to wildlife policy, management, and conservation as well as train multiple undergraduate and graduate students and early-career stage researchers in STEM. While several studies link sociality to fitness in long-lived mammals, maternal influence on inter- and intra-individual variation in sociality (e.g. dynamic social patterns) and fitness outcomes is relatively unexplored. This study investigates how sociality evolved, not just why. Recent computational advances allow this project to incorporate multi-level, dynamic variation to advance understanding of how sociality evolved, i.e., transmission pathways. This study system, a 35-year longitudinal study of wild bottlenose dolphins, provides a unique opportunity to address these questions because of species characteristics, and the size, detail, and long-term nature of the dataset. This project will use: 1). novel quantitative genetics methodologies to unravel the importance of maternal effects on social behavior while accounting for both additive genetic variation and the mothers' social environment; 2). next-generation sequencing combined with demographic data to construct accurate pedigree information from high- density single nucleotide polymorphisms; 3). dynamic social network modeling (social association/interaction matrices) to account for changing social attributes of individuals rather than just static traits. As such, this study will be a comprehensive exploration of how maternal effects impact social traits over the lifespan and across more than one generation within an evolutionary framework. In addition, this is the first study to do so in wild long-lived mammal with extensive maternal social transmission, while accounting for additive genetic variation. The results will provide significant advances by extending our study of the genetic and non-genetic mechanisms of inheritance, which play critical roles in evolution and responses to environmental change.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.