Collaborative Research: Life in a Changing Environment

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Environmental change is a cornerstone of major theories of human origins. Adaptation to environmental variability--seasonal, random, and directional over decades--is also a key feature of savanna baboons, a large, widespread species of non-human primates that shares many features with humans. The current investigations will focus on the baboon population of Amboseli, a population that has experienced extensive environmental change over the past several decades for which information is available, and that has persisted in the face of this environmental change. Behavior, the centerpiece of the current investigations, plays a pivotal role in adaptation to environmental variability. It has both immediate, short-term consequences for maintaining internal stability and profound long-term consequences for the lives of individuals and for the evolutionary trajectories of populations The current project will evaluate and test predictions about behavioral and physiological consequences of environmental change, and about the effects of environmental change on birth and death rates. Estimates of gene flow patterns in the study population will also be developed using newly applied statistical methods in combination with genetic markers. By incorporating demographic, behavioral, environmental, genetic, and hormonal data in an integrative framework, the work will serve several specific goals. (1) It will provide detailed information on how environmental change affects fitness components and related traits. (2) It will elucidate the extent to which individuals are differentially affected by, and respond to, environmental change. This will provide important insight into traits that confer an adaptive advantage in the face of environmental change. (3) It will provide important information on the impact of short time-scale environmental change, and on the population structure of a species experiencing such change. (4) It will provide vital data on how organisms adapt to environmental change. This is highly relevant for biological conservation in the current period of rapid, anthropogenic climate change. This project is, of necessity and design, intrinsically interdisciplinary. It will both utilize and enhance integration of concepts, data, and techniques across a range of social and biological sciences. This project will greatly expand the investigators' long history of training American and Kenyan students-training activities that are intimately connected with the research goals. Recent human resource development has focused on training for 6 post-doctoral fellows, 7 Ph.D. candidates (2 of them Kenyan), 3 M.Sc. students (2 of them Kenyan), 24 undergraduates (including 5 African-Americans and 3 Hispanic women), and 1 high school student. The investigators also actively collaborate with 4 Kenyan scientists and are working with them on relevant in-country capacity-building activities. Proposed exchange visits and a working group meeting in Kenya will further advance these goals and lay an even more solid base for enduring impact. The project will also extend the investigators' activities toward enhancement of infrastructure and dissemination of results. The PIs are among the first to refine and apply non-invasive techniques for obtaining and utilizing genetic and hormonal samples, techniques that are of increasing importance worldwide for ethical, scientific, and regulatory reasons. In addition, a major task of the investigators in the past few years has been to design and implement a comprehensive database that includes the many diverse data sets associated with the long-term baboon project. The database design has been shared with a number of other scientists upon request. In addition, a website has been developed for their field research project (www.princeton.edu/~baboon), which serves as a vehicle for providing information and data to the public, students from K through post-graduate, and colleagues.