Year: 2023
Type: preprint
Abstract: Weather-related disasters can radically alter ecosystems. When disaster-driven ecological damage persists, the selective pressures exerted on individuals can change, eventually leading to phenotypic adjustments. For group-living animals, social relationships are believed to help individuals cope with environmental challenges and may be a critical mechanism enabling adaptation to ecosystems degraded by disasters. Yet, whether natural disasters alter selective pressures on patterns of social interactions and whether group-living animals can, as a result, adaptively change their social relationships remains untested. Here, we leveraged unique data collected on rhesus macaques from 5 years before to 5 years after a category 4 hurricane, leading to persistent deforestation which exacerbated monkeys' exposure to intense heat. In response, macaques increased tolerance for and decreased aggression toward other monkeys, facilitating access to scarce shade critical for thermoregulation. Social tolerance predicted individual survival for 5 years after the hurricane, but not before it, revealing a clear shift in the adaptive function of social relationships in this population. We demonstrate that an extreme climatic event altered selection on sociality and triggered substantial and persistent changes in the social structure of a primate species. Our findings unveil the function and adaptive flexibility of social relationships in degraded ecosystems and identify natural disasters as potential evolutionary drivers of sociality. One-Sentence Summary: show that a natural disaster altered selection on sociality in group-living primates triggering persistent changes in their social structure.
Authors: C. Testard, C. Shergold, A. Acevedo-Ithier, J. Hart, A. Bernau, JE. Negron-Del Valle, D. Phillips, MM. Watowich, JI. Sanguinetti-Scheck, MJ. Montague, N. Snyder-Mackler, JP. Higham, ML. Platt, LJN. Brent
Language: English
Topic: Primate Behavior and Ecology
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4384829075