BRC-BIO: The evolutionary demography of a social mammal

BRC-BIO：社会哺乳动物的进化人口统计学

• 批准号: 2217812
• 负责人: Raisa Hernandez Pacheco
• 金额: $ 45.3万
• 依托单位: California State University-Long Beach Foundation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-09-01 至 2025-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2217812&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: BRC; BIO; evolutionary; demography; social

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.

社会环境被认为在包括人类在内的社会哺乳动物的命运中发挥着重要作用，例如，相对于处于社会弱势的个体，处于社会优势的个体往往能够获得更多的资源，从而获得更好的健康、更多的后代和更长的寿命。然而，目前尚不清楚哺乳动物生活中的社会因素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、较长寿命和灵活认知能力的哺乳动物（如灵长类动物）来说，这种知识差距会进一步加深。 .该项目旨在了解是否社会性对个人命运的影响最终会利用恒河猴（一种非人类灵长类动物）的数据转化为种群水平的过程，这一目标将通过建立一个以教育和培训为基础的研究团队来实现，该团队旨在扩大定量和领域的机会。该项目主要针对本科生和少数族裔服务机构的学生进行研究，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，该项目将为提高学生多样性的国家举措做出贡献。这STEM 研究人员通过整合培训和指导，扩大来自不同背景的学员接触跨学科生物学和定量技能的机会。该项目将确定社会驱动的个体差异如何以及为何对灵长类动物种群的生态进化动态产生直接和重大的影响，该项目将采用跨学科方法，在单一系统内联合检查经验收集的行为、身体和认知因素，然后使用。这个数据来测试波多黎各圣地亚哥岛大量恒河猴（Macaca mulatta）社会环境的生态进化后果第一个目标是描述社会驱动的个体表型的分布，包括身体和认知特征。这将用于测试个体之间的身体和认知表型是否因其社会地位而有所不同，第二个目标是量化整个人口社会结构中表型依赖性的人口表现。目标 1 中观察到的个体表型和社会性之间的关联。第三个目标是通过检查选择的强度和方向在社会分层中的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，参数化人口统计模型。目标 2 将用于对表型人口统计学功能进行联合扰动分析，该框架将用于评估社会性是否支持驱动种群内生态进化过程的个体表型的出现和维持。该奖项反映了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，NSF 的法定使命被认为值得支持。