Collaborative Research: Relationship Among Demographic, Social and Genetic Structure

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Susan C. Alberts and Jeanne Altmann: Proposal number 0322781(Altmann)/0322613(Alberts), Collaborative Research: Relationship among demographic, social and genetic structure. Behavior plays a pivotal role in survival and reproduction. Its immediate, short-term impact is in maintaining homeostasis and organismal integrity as behavior provides the individual with a mechanism of rapid and flexible response to changes in its internal and external environments. Even more profound is behavior's long-term impact on the lives of individuals and on the evolutionary trajectories of populations. The main long-term objective of the investigators is to develop a comprehensive picture of how behavior shapes fitness outcomes and population processes in one population of wild mammals - the savanna baboons of the Amboseli basin in east Africa. The proposed work not only will accomplish important short-term goals but will reach overtly toward the long-term ones as well. The overall conceptual framework is an integrative socioecology that is sensitive to the intrinsic interdependencies among behavior, physiology, genetic structure, and demography. During the next three years, the research will (1) probe more deeply into the function and lifetime development of relationships through individuals' paternal as well as maternal lineage and (2) continue to delineate sources of lifetime fitness differences for both sexes. This will be accomplished by testing eight explicit predictions derived from three hypotheses. For females, these relate to the impact of social status and of paternal and maternal relatives on fitness. For males they address the relationship between mating success and paternity success, the role of male mate choice in paternity success, and the direct behavioral contributions that males make to the survival of their offspring. Genetic and physiological analyses are based on non-invasive biological sampling and associated assay and genotyping techniques, the development and refinement of which have been a cornerstone of these research groups.