Environmental Structuring Of Individual Action In A Social Mammal

我的研究解决了灵长类群体的个体成员(主要是非洲黑猩猩)如何应对由其物理、生态和社会环境构成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，这对他们的反应造成了限制，我的意思是，密切共存的需要带来了直接的问题，如当地对资源的竞争加剧，而对独立于他人行动的能力的限制，也限制了现有解决办法的范围。我对这些问题的长期兴趣与社会认知的性质和推动社会认知的选择性力量有关。在短期内，在实现这一目标的过程中，我的学生和我打算记录下挑战的性质，以及不同个人对三个不同领域提出的问题的不同反应。首先，我们将使用寄生虫载量和发烧情况来检查不同群体成员对感染的易感和暴露程度。这一点的核心是我们对社会融合的关注，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(可能抑制或增强感染的传播)和全球社会网络结构来缓冲自己免受感染的影响，我们希望这将揭示动物检测其他动物感染并调整它们的互动特征以降低疾病风险的能力。由于气候变化正在迅速使动物面临新的和更多的感染风险，我们还希望调查动物与其感染水平相关的行为，看看我们是否可以设计出一个健康指数，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虫群数量。其次，我们将继续我们的发现，通过考虑从男性加入群体的那一刻起，男性-女性和男性-男性关系的动态，女性蠕虫可以超过男性，并影响他们的等级轨迹，尽管身体上更小。在这两个案例中，最主要的问题是，男性如何应对这个不寻常的事实，即在这个物种中，女性拥有巨大的生殖力。我们期望看到雄性培养雌性，并相互竞争这样做，雌性优先响应特定的雄性，它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攻击性群体间相互作用的高比率来探索导致一些人而不是其他人以潜在的高风险参与的因素。我们希望找出将参与者捆绑在一起的社会互动模式，并表明这些模式对个人身份的变化是稳健的，并描述幼年动物被诱导为参与者的途径。

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.