Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Unit, German Primate Center, Kellnerweg 4, 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier (ISEM), UMR 5554, Place Eugène Bataillon, 34095 Montpellier Cedex 5, France.
Biol Lett. 2020 Feb;16(2):20190869. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2019.0869. Epub 2020 Feb 26.
Several species mitigate relationships according to their conspecifics' parasite status. Yet, this defence strategy comes with the costs of depriving individuals from valuable social bonds. Animals therefore face a trade-off between the costs of pathogen exposure and the benefits of social relationships. According to the models of social evolution, social bonds are highly kin-biased. However, whether kinship mitigates social avoidance of contagious individuals has never been tested so far. Here, we build on previous research to demonstrate that mandrills () modulate social avoidance of contagious individuals according to kinship: individuals do not avoid grooming their close maternal kin when contagious (parasitized with oro-faecally transmitted protozoa), although they do for more distant or non-kin. While individuals' parasite status has seldom been considered as a trait impacting social relationships in animals, this study goes a step beyond by showing that kinship balances the effect of health status on social behaviour in a non-human primate.
几种物种根据同种个体的寄生虫状况来调节它们之间的关系。然而，这种防御策略会使个体失去有价值的社会联系，从而带来代价。因此，动物在病原体暴露的成本和社会关系的收益之间面临权衡。根据社会进化模型，社会联系具有强烈的亲缘偏向性。然而，亲缘关系是否会减轻对传染性个体的社会回避，迄今尚未得到验证。在这里，我们在前人的研究基础上，证明了山魈会根据亲缘关系来调节对传染性个体的社会回避：当传染性个体（感染了经口-粪传播的原生动物）具有亲缘关系时，个体不会避免与其进行梳理，尽管它们会对更远的或非亲缘关系的个体进行回避。虽然个体的寄生虫状况很少被认为是影响动物社会关系的特征，但这项研究更进一步，表明在非人类灵长类动物中，亲缘关系平衡了健康状况对社会行为的影响。
