CAREER: Social Behavior and Genetics in a Fission-Fusion Society of African Elephants

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

CAREER: Social behavior and genetics in a fission-fusion society. Susan C. Alberts Focusing on a wild population of African elephants, the proposed project will test critical hypotheses about the evolution of social behavior, using both behavioral data and genetic techniques. These hypotheses address (1) the causes of differences in mating success among males, (2) the extent and mechanisms of inbreeding avoidance, (3) the extent to which social relationships are determined by kinship, and (4) the impact of behavior on the genetic structure of populations. The questions addressed in this proposal are of both general importance for understanding the evolution of social behavior, and of particular importance for understanding the relationship between behavior and genes in a well-studied population of a threatened species. The work will involve the African elephant population in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, which has been the subject of ongoing behavioral and demographic studies since 1974. Elephants, like many social mammals, exhibit long-term associations among female relatives, and mating behavior that favors a class of socially dominant males. However, unlike most mammals, elephants exhibit a very fluid form of fission-fusion society, in which an individual elephant may associate with almost every member of the population in a given year. This raises unique questions about inbreeding avoidance where relatives encounter each other unpredictably, about cooperation in unstable social settings, and about genetic differentiation and gene flow within and between fluid societies. The genetic component of the project will include a large-scale microsatellite analysis and a study of mitochondrial DNA, focusing on 400 individuals. These genetic data will be used to establish (1) paternity for a subset of calves, (2) levels of relatedness between breeding females and males, (3) levels of genetic relatedness between females in focal families, and (4) the distribution of maternal and paternal kin networks within and across families. The educational component of the project includes graduate and undergraduate course development, as well as the development of a workshop for Durham area high school biology teachers, who have expressed a pressing need for additional course content for their classrooms. Durham area public schools have a high (>60%) minority enrollment as well as a strong commitment to science education, including the teaching of evolution. The workshop aims to provide course content in behavioral ecology, and to capitalize on the strong popular appeal of this sub-discipline in order to increase interest in basic biological research among Durham's diverse student population.