BRC-BIO: The evolutionary demography of a social mammal

社会环境被认为在社会性哺乳动物（包括人类）的命运中起着重要作用。例如，相对于经常经历更严酷环境的社会弱势个体，社会弱势个体通常有更多的机会获得资源，从而获得更好的健康，更多的后代和更长的寿命。然而，目前还不清楚哺乳动物生活中的社会方面如何影响其种群的生态和进化动态。对于具有复杂社会行为、长寿命和灵活认知能力的哺乳动物，如灵长类动物，这种知识差距会加深。该项目旨在了解社会性对个体命运的影响是否最终转化为群体水平的过程，使用非人类灵长类动物恒河猴的数据。这一目标将通过建立一个建立在教育和培训基础上的研究团队来实现，旨在为优先本科生和少数民族服务机构的学生扩大定量和实地研究的机会，其中一半以上的学生也来自第一代大学，低收入背景。通过这种方式，该项目将通过整合培训和导师制，为来自不同背景的学员拓宽跨学科生物学和定量技能的获取途径，为增加STEM研究人员多样性的国家倡议做出贡献。该项目将确定社会驱动的个体差异如何以及为什么对灵长类种群的生态进化动态产生直接和重大影响，将目前对个体变异性的社会决定因素的研究与进化人口学方法联系起来，以了解生活史进化的基本规则。该项目将采取跨学科的方法，通过联合检查经验收集的行为，身体和认知因素在一个单一的系统，然后使用这些数据来测试在圣地亚哥，波多黎各的一个大型人口的恒河猴（猕猴mulatta）的社会环境的生态进化后果。第一个目标是表征社会驱动的个体表型的分布，包括身体和认知特征，在整个生命周期。这将用于测试身体和认知表型是否因社会地位而异。第二个目标是量化整个人口社会结构中依赖表型的人口表现。在这里，将使用观察到的个体表型与目标1中的社会性之间的关联来制定人口统计模型。第三个目的是通过研究选择的强度和方向如何在社会分层中变化来测试社会性是否会在人口统计和生活史描述符上产生选择梯度。为此，将使用目标2中的参数化人口统计学模型对表型-人口统计学函数进行联合扰动分析。该框架将用于评估社会性是否支持个体表型的出现和维持，从而推动种群内的生态进化过程。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The social environment is thought to play a major role in the fate of social mammals, including humans. For example, socially advantaged individuals often have more access to resources resulting in better health, more offspring, and longer lives, relative to socially disadvantaged individuals who often experience harsher environments. However, it is still unclear how social aspects in the life of mammals affect the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of their populations. This knowledge gap deepens for mammals with complex social behaviors, long lifespan, and flexible cognitive abilities such as primates. This project seeks to understand whether the effects of sociality on individual fates ultimately translates into population-level processes using data of rhesus macaques, a nonhuman primate. This goal will be accomplished by establishing a research team built on a foundation of education and training aimed at broadening opportunities for quantitative and field research for students at a Primarily Undergraduate and a Minority-Serving Institution where over half of the total student body also comes from first-generation college, low-income backgrounds. In this way, this project will contribute to the national initiative of increasing diversity of the STEM research workforce by integrating training and mentorship to broaden access to interdisciplinary biology and quantitative skills to mentees from diverse backgrounds.This project will identify how and why socially driven individual differences have direct and significant effects on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a primate population, linking current research in the social determinants of individual variability to evolutionary demography approaches to the fundamental rules of life history evolution. The project will take an interdisciplinary approach by jointly examining empirically collected behavioral, physical, and cognitive factors within a single system, and then using this data to test the eco-evolutionary consequences of the social environment in a large population of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) at Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. The first aim is to characterize the distribution of socially driven individual phenotypes, comprising both physical and cognitive traits, across the lifespan. This will be used to test whether physical and cognitive phenotypes vary across individuals in relation to their social status. The second aim is to quantify phenotype-dependent demographic performance across the population’s social structure. Here, a demographic model will be formulated using the observed associations between individual phenotypes and sociality from Aim 1. The third aim is to test whether sociality generates selection gradients on demographic and life history descriptors by examining how the strength and direction of selection varies across social stratification. For this, the parameterized demographic model from Aim 2 will be used to carry out joint perturbation analyses on phenotype-demography functions. This framework will be used to evaluate whether sociality supports the emergence and maintenance of individual phenotypes driving eco-evolutionary processes within populations.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.